


swan song

by superfluouskeys



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Blindfolds, Duskwight Elezen Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), F/M, Female Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Named Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Patch 5.0: Shadowbringers Spoilers, Secret Identity, bonus points if you can guess which sections were written during praetorium cutscenes LOL, if you see me in msq roulette this is almost certainly what I am doing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-14 11:13:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29294973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superfluouskeys/pseuds/superfluouskeys
Summary: “Would you…prefer to be alone?” the Exarch asks her gently.Would she?  Adrienne almost laughs bitterly.  If not, she’s doing a fine job of showing it.  “No,” she says, like it’s a confession.  “No, I don’t want to be alone.”  She looks up, searching, pleading.  “Does anyone?”
Relationships: G'raha Tia | Crystal Exarch/Warrior of Light
Comments: 43
Kudos: 113





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I dunno man I just got really into reading hooded Exarch fic and so I wanted to write my own. Bless [this lovely discord](https://discord.gg/enabling-debauched-xivfic) for bringing me such inspiration! Unless I'm like blocking something out I do not think I've ever written anything quite like this before LOL, but I'm very happy with how it turned out, and I hope you'll enjoy! I think I might want to continue this?
> 
> Small additional CW for brief mention of alcohol use and crying from overstimulation.

Even when the sun sets following their return from Amh Araeng, it seems there will be no denying the light on this day. It is the first full moon Norvrandt has seen in over a hundred years, and it bathes the Crystarium in a glow that ought to be beautiful.

Ardbert is looking at her like she’ll break. Or like she’ll turn. In the light of the full moon, he looks more the part of a ghost than ever before. Adrienne doesn’t know whether it’s the primordial Light threatening to tear her apart at any moment or whether she has simply reached the admittedly unimpressive limits of her patience, but she is halfway through her second cup of some mysterious spirits she’s found in the well-stocked cabinets of her Pendants room, and every word he speaks is still profoundly irritating.

Adrienne wonders idly what the Crystal Exarch would say if she told him she was seeing a ghost in her room at night. Feeling half-mad upon her arrival, she’d almost told him that first day. It is strange to remember that it had been mistrust that had stayed her tongue then.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Ardbert presses. “You…probably shouldn’t be drinking.”

Adrienne almost curses at him. Mercifully, the spirits have rendered her reaction time slow enough to stop herself. At least—she chooses to believe it is the spirits. She shoots him a look of contempt.

Ardbert hesitates. “Look, about what happened in Amh Araeng—“

“Has it occurred to you,” she says, quietly but forcefully, “that the reason I am drinking is that I don’t want to think about that right now?’

Ardbert falters. She feels a little badly for snapping at him, but mostly she just wants him to leave her alone. As if in direct opposition to her thoughts, there’s a knock at the door. Ardbert vanishes, leaving nothing but the moonlit night in his wake. Adrienne rests her face in her hands.

“Come in,” she sighs.

The door creaks open. “Pray forgive the intrusion,” says a voice so familiar, it aches.

She’s just realized, in fact, exactly of whom his voice reminds her. It’s an ancient and half-remembered sorrow by now, a tear shed for a young man who longed for answers and received instead the burden of a legacy.

“Minfilia—that is to say, Ryne—and the others, they wanted to know how you were getting on. A foolish question, perhaps, but.” His words hang in the air, destined to remain unfinished.

Could it be a familiar face beneath the cowl, rendered unrecognizable by the ravages of time and distance? She had asked about him, that first day, sick from her journey and half-convinced she was dreaming, but the Exarch had sounded so certain, and there had been so much more to worry about that she hadn’t thought about it since. A mystery for another time, he had assured her, and because the Exarch is the sort of person who makes you want to listen to him, Adrienne had.

“May I ask you a personal question, Exarch?” Adrienne wonders quietly. She hasn’t managed to lift her head.

He hesitates. “There are…many things about myself I must conceal,” he says carefully. “I would like to say I’d tell you anything you wanted to know, but…”

“Hm. That’s sort of my question,” says Adrienne. “Why?” She wills herself to look up, but focuses her attention upon her drink. She doesn’t know what it is. It doesn’t taste like anything from the Source. “What do personal details about yourself have to do with any of this?”

She can see the Exarch fidgeting in her periphery. She realizes she’s never seen him display any other signs of nervousness before. She takes another drink.

“If...certain parties…discovered who I once was,” says the Exarch slowly, “they would find themselves with a great deal of ammunition, not only against me, but against you and yours, as well.”

Adrienne sighs dramatically in an effort to lighten the mood. “Oh, I suppose that’s reasonable,” she drawls as she goes for another sip of her drink. Her arms are beginning to feel blissfully heavy.

The Exarch watches her for a moment. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a drinker.”

“No?” She takes another long drink for good measure, then gestures vaguely in front of her. Much as she wanted to be alone not a moment prior, now she feels rather desperate to keep the Exarch here. “Will you join me? I promise I won’t try to pry your secrets out of you.”

He hesitates. She wonders distantly if he will refuse her, if he pities her now, or finds her weakness revolting. He has gone to great lengths to summon her here across the rift, and she feels herself beginning to come apart at the seams.

“A dear friend asked me once,” she says, resting her chin in her hand and tracing the rim of her glass with a fingertip, “how I did the things I did. I told him I didn’t know, I just…I had to. Because no one else could.” She doesn’t add that she might have answered differently, if she’d realized why he was asking.

“Do you resent it?” the Exarch speaks, so quickly and so softly that she briefly wonders if she’s imagined it. “Do you resent…me? For bringing you here?”

Adrienne thinks a moment before she looks up at him. Ordinarily his face is hard to read beneath the cowl, but just now his lips are drawn tight as he awaits her answer. Would it really bring him such pain, if she resented him?

“No,” she says, truthfully. “You needed me, so I’m here. Everyone I’ve ever loved is—“

What? Here? Or gone?

“Well. Either here, or gone,” she lifts a shoulder and half-attempts a smile.

The Exarch doesn’t respond. Adrienne turns her attention back to her drink.

“You remind me of him, a little,” she confesses. The words feel heavier than she’d meant them to.

“Of your friend?”

“Mhm,” she takes another drink, swallowing hard against an onslaught of emotion. “It’s your voice, I think.”

“My voice?” He sounds nervous again. Adrienne fervently wishes she hadn’t said anything. She doesn’t want to think about this. On top of everything else, she cannot _bear_ to think about this. Because the best she can hope for her young friend is that he is still asleep in the Crystal Tower of the Source, safe and sound and forever lost to the world he once knew.

“I’m sorry I said anything,” she breathes. Then, in a poor attempt at lightness, “It seems I shouldn’t be a drinker, after all. It’s made me dreadfully sentimental.”

A sudden movement catches her eye. The Crystal Exarch approaches at last. “There’s nothing wrong with that,” he says, with his usual quiet certainty. “Those you count among your friends are…most fortunate. For how deeply you care for them, I mean.”

Another terrible wave of grief threatens to overtake her. She looks up, steeling herself against it. “That includes you, you know.”

His lips part. She wonders whether, beneath the cowl, he is looking away, abashed.

“Won’t you tell me something of yourself?” she wonders, overcome by absurd fondness for a man she barely knows, and should not find endearing, of all things. “Surely there’s something inconsequential enough to share.”

The Exarch’s tongue darts across his lips. He inhales slowly and squares his shoulders, as though making a conscious effort to restore himself to his usual manner. “I used to like to sing,” he says at last.

The answer is as stunning as it is delightful. “What did you sing?”

The Exarch draws his hands together in front of himself, as though he is bashful. Adrienne’s heart flutters unhelpfully. “Folk songs, battle hymns, anything I heard and liked.” He chuckles breathlessly. “I wrote a few of my own, as foolish youths are wont to do.”

Adrienne leans on her hand as she considers him. “I don’t suppose you’d favour me with a song?” she dares.

He startles visibly. “Oh, I…hardly remember, and you’re not missing anything, I assure you.”

“Oh, I’m sure I disagree,” says Adrienne richly. “I shan’t badger you, but do know that this subject is not closed.”

The Exarch laughs. “I daresay when the last Lightwarden falls, we shall all be in the mood to sing,” he says, but there is an unmistakable note of sorrow in his voice.

“Right,” says Adrienne flatly. She decides she’ll take up drinking again.

A heavy moment passes. “Would you…prefer to be alone?” the Exarch asks her gently.

Would she? Adrienne almost laughs bitterly. If not, she’s doing a fine job of showing it. “No,” she says, like it’s a confession. “No, I don’t want to be alone.” She looks up, searching, pleading. “Does anyone?”

The Exarch moves forward as though on instinct, utterly divorced from the usual hesitancy and restraint she has come to recognize as his body language. He takes the seat beside her and takes her hand in his before he seems to remember himself, and whatever he meant to say dies on his lips.

Adrienne watches him, surprised by the sudden closeness, thrilled by the unexpected warmth of his hand. He has offered her his left hand, she notes, while the right one—the one shrouded in crystal, is clutched close to his body, nearly hidden by the fabric of his robes. With no eyes to look into, she cannot help but to consider the gentle curve of his cheek, the elegant slope of his nose, and his lips, still parted with words destined to remain unspoken.

She draws his hand close to her chest as she leans in, certain he will stop her, certain she will stop herself. She can hear the unevenness of his breathing now, can feel it just shy of her lips. The Exarch’s grip on her hand tightens. Why is she doing this?

Kissing him feels—good. Right. The sharp intake of air, the way his free hand grasps at her, settling upon her knee as though to steady himself. For one blissful moment, she is not the Warrior of Light or of Darkness, not forged of something stronger than steel, not on the verge of being torn apart by forces beyond her ken. She is just Adrienne, who loves magic and mystery and puzzles, and the Exarch is all of those things.

Adrienne’s eyes flutter open, looking up without thinking, only to find a shroud of darkness, impenetrable even as she is caught up in the midst of it. She wonders whether the glamour would give way, even if she pressed her face right up to his. She wonders what colour his eyes could be.

Neither of them has moved. The Exarch is trembling beneath her touch, his breathing coming in halting gasps. She ought to pull away, ought to apologize, ought to ask him if he is all right.

But he hasn’t let go of her, of her hand or her knee, and his fingers digging into the inside of her thigh are sending a thrill right through her, sharp and exciting and impossible to ignore. How long has it been, since she’s been touched? How long since she has _wanted_ to be touched like this? And what about him?

Adrienne kisses him again, still feather-light, this time daring a little brush of her tongue over his bottom lip. The Exarch lets out a shuddering sigh, and Adrienne is certain that the next kiss begins with him. His hands find her waist, and he leans into her, kissing her with a passion, a desperation she would not have expected, but one that mirrors her own.

She doesn’t want to think about dying. She doesn’t want to think about losing people. How long has it been since she’s felt something so unequivocally good? Could it be the same for him?

He pulls away with a ragged gasp. “I _can’t_ ,” he breathes, sounding just shy of devastated.

Perhaps it is a testament to the direness of Adrienne’s circumstances that she does not immediately relent. She doesn’t chase people, finds no joy in being where she isn’t obviously and enthusiastically wanted, but this strikes her as different somehow, a mystery to uncover, not unlike the Exarch, himself. And so, “Why not?” she asks him, running her hands over his shoulders, feeling the tension he holds there.

A strangled laugh escapes the Exarch’s lips. “I couldn’t begin to number the reasons,” he says, disbelieving, but he does not let go of her, nor does he move even the slightest bit away. “For one, I cannot even bare my face to you.”

Curiously, he speaks not with the air of one who means to dissuade her, but of one who longs to be dissuaded. It sends a thrill through her that she cannot readily understand, but she is well past her capacity for thinking logically for the night. She drapes her arms lazily over his shoulders and affords him an easy grin. “Keep your cowl, or—“ a wicked thought tugs at the corners of her lips, twisting her reassuring smile into something far more provocative, “—blindfold me, if it please you,” she suggests, with a playful tilt of her head. “Surely you don’t mean to tell me that I am the only person who’s ever been fascinated by mystery, Exarch?”

She’s feeling a bit apart from herself, actually, a mixture of the mysterious spirits she’s imbibed and her willful avoidance of the manifold thoughts that plague her, but it is a welcome change to feel truly excited by something so relatively inconsequential—at least, so she thinks.

The Exarch’s mouth hangs open for a long while. He attempts a few stammering syllables before he manages, in little more than a whisper, “You could have… _anyone_.”

His vulnerability takes her completely by surprise, though she supposes it explains the way he’s reacted to her so far. Still, she’s seldom glimpsed so much as a trace of it. The Crystal Exarch exudes calm certainty, takes even the gravest of threats in stride. He worries for his people, certainly, and for whether he is doing what is best in their name, in some grand and heavy sense--the details of which, she assumes, are related to why he obscures so much of himself. But to doubt himself in such a comparatively small matter is not something she could ever have anticipated.

Adrienne closes what little distance lingers between them. She speaks not a breath away from his lips. “Why would I want anyone else?” she asks him.

The Exarch’s grip tightens subtly upon her waist. Feeling giddy with the promise of victory, she draws her hands over his shoulders once more, and begins to drag her fingertips suggestively down his chest. “All I want,” she breathes, “is to forget about all of this, just for a little while. To feel something good.” She brushes her nose against his, lips just barely ghosting over his, and delights in his shuddering gasp.

“Would you give that to me?” she entreats him.

There’s more she means to say, but, “ _Anything_ ,” he tells her, so fervently her heart stutters at the sound. “I would give you…anything,” he amends.

She believes him. It would be a bizarre thing to hear another person say in any context, and it stuns her into stillness.

“Forgive me my candour,” he stammers, abashed.

Adrienne grabs hold of his robes, worried he’ll pull away out of embarrassment.

“Though,” he continues, with a hint of something new in his tone, “the sentiment is true, and no less than you deserve.”

A nervous huff of laughter escapes Adrienne’s lips. She kisses him again, almost shyly, and then grabs for his hands as she makes to stand, intending to pull him towards her bed. “My,” she says breathlessly, “with such honeyed words, one would think you were the one trying to seduce me.”

The Exarch follows her lead willingly. “Am I not?” he wonders, sounding strangely cheerful. “I expect at any moment you shall realize your mistake, and I shall have to vie for your attention afresh, all the more desperate for having once tasted of it.”

His words render her at least as dizzy as the alcohol. “I think I’d quite like that, if you intend to be this persuasive.”

“So,” the Exarch draws nearer, his tone decidedly mirthful, “you do enjoy the way people fall all over themselves to please you?”

“I didn’t say that!” Adrienne balks.

The Exarch’s lips betray his amusement. It’s truthfully a very alluring expression, which is a strange thing to think when the majority of his face is hidden from her. He draws her hand up to his lips. “Ah, but I am only too willing to oblige you,” he says.

She stops, thrown off-balance by his words, equal parts embarrassing and enticing, and mercifully, the Exarch is happy to take the lead, guiding her down onto the bed. “It would…be easier,” he concedes haltingly, “if you would allow me to--if you truly wouldn’t mind, I mean…”

Such a contrast, she thinks, between the steady and confident Exarch she has come to expect and this charmingly bashful shadow she could never have guessed at. After taking a moment to appreciate the sweetness of it, she glances around the room thoughtfully. “I picked up a sash belt in my travels, I think,” she says, gesturing to her pack, settled a short distance from the bed. “That ought to serve well enough.”

The Exarch presses another decidedly reverent kiss to her knuckles before he retrieves it dutifully, and Adrienne licks her lips in anticipation. She’s never thought to ask anyone for such a thing, never had any particular reason, nor stayed with any one person long enough to feel comfortable experimenting, but now that the idea has occurred to her, her body fairly sings with growing excitement.

“You’re sure?” the Exarch asks her again, with hands outstretched. She wonders how she must look to him, that he cannot see the way she trembles in anticipation.

“Absolutely,” she assures him with a small grin, and then she sees nothing more.

 _Oh_ , it is very nearly too much to bear. Adrienne has always liked to touch and feel things to get a real sense for them, and the sensation is magnified tenfold with the occlusion of her vision. The Exarch’s left hand is rough, pleasantly callused, while the right one is cold and bizarrely smooth, like polished stone. He is bolder, surer in his movements now that she’s not watching him, and her own excitement renders her eager and grasping for more of him.

“I must ask,” he breathes against the crook of her neck, “one more thing of you.”

 _Anything_ , she almost tells him in kind, and the thought feels so _genuine_ that it unnerves her into silence.

“If I should—stay your hands,” he continues haltingly, “I ask that you heed me. Merely a matter of concealing—certain features…typical of my race.”

Adrienne’s mind runs wild with the possibilities. Strangely, she is near-delighted by this admission of absolutely nothing, which is perhaps a testament to how deeply the Exarch’s mystery has come to fascinate her. “Truthfully I only realized now I’ve been thinking of you as a Hyur who was a little on the small side,” she tells him.

He laughs gently, surprised but not offended. “And so I might be,” he says mysteriously.

She tugs at his robes to pull him into a kiss, the only way she can think of to properly express how she’s finding she quite likes him this way, shy yet playful. She had expected him to be a bit darker in such matters, a bit more serious, but she realizes this only now, as she thinks of it in contrast to the way he is shaping up to be.

He traverses the curve of her jaw with his lips, fervent kisses that leave her weak and wanting, but he stays her hand at the back of his neck, before she can feel more than the barest brush of his hair. She is somehow both disappointed and enticed—she’d have liked to know what his hair feels like, but the mystery dangled quite literally just shy of her grasp is a joy all its own. Does he keep it long or short? Is it curly or straight? What colour would she see, if she were so permitted? Will the day ever come when she is?

But she acquiesces without protest, and she is quickly distracted from this particular trail of thought when he sets about divesting her of her robes. She’d been so agitated before, she hadn’t even begun to undress for the night, and it is no small relief to be rid of the clothes she’s been wearing a few too many days. 

The Exarch’s hands upon her bare skin, one warm and rough, one smooth and cold, are purest bliss, and she shivers under his attention. He runs his hands over her arms and threads his fingers with hers as his lips find her breast. Perhaps it’s a mercy he’s holding her hands, or perhaps it’s by design, for she’d already half-forgotten that she isn’t supposed to touch his head, and she fairly arches off the bed into his touch, desperate to grab a fistful of his hair, to keep him there forever.

But he does not leave her wanting. He presses her hands gently into the sheets as he draws her nipple between his teeth. She can only liken the sound she makes to a whine, and the warm breath of his answering chuckle sends a shiver coursing through her. Suddenly she is hyper-aware of the way he has perched himself with knees on either side of her thighs, subtly holding her in place, sitting a little too low for her to be able to feel—

Well. There are other ways to tell that he is aroused, of course, from the clenching of his hands in hers to the fevered kisses he bestows upon her breasts, but her mind cannot help but to catch upon yet another mystery, and to what extent he might permit her to explore it.

The Exarch releases her hands as his lips travel downward, but he moves with intent, meaning to divest her of her trousers before he realizes she’s still wearing her boots. He presses one last kiss to her belly, just above the waistband of her trousers, before he moves away. “Forgive me,” he says as he pulls off her left boot. “I was…lost in the moment.”

“What’s to forgive?” Adrienne wonders, dazed. She feels him shift off the bed, hears him set each of her boots down with care, probably next to her pack.

Before she has time to really think about that, his attention returns to the matter of her trousers, though he draws them off her more slowly than he’d meant to before. When she is laid very nearly bare before him, she can feel his movement, but doesn’t understand it until he presses a kiss between her legs, one she can clearly feel through the soaked fabric of her smallclothes.

She inhales sharply and reaches out blindly for something to grasp onto. She finds his shoulder, surprisingly well-muscled for one with such a slight frame, and finds herself longing to know what his bare skin feels like, beneath the silken fabric of his robes. How far does the crystal spread?

It is with this thought in her mind that the Exarch relieves her of her smallclothes and presses another kiss between her legs, this time without even the meager scrap of cloth to bar him. He kisses her again, a gesture almost chaste, before he parts her with his tongue, slowly, with intent.

“ _Oh_ ,” Adrienne breathes, digging her fingers into his shoulder as his tongue flicks across her clit. He takes his time exploring her, occasionally favouring her with his own soft noises of pleasure. He circles her thighs with his arms, one cold crystal, one flesh, but swathed in leather straps that match his sandals, and holds her close to him as he picks up his pace, though he needn’t have bothered. She is more desperate than ever to be near to him, positively arching off the bed to grind against his tongue.

What she would give to be able to run her fingers through his hair, to see the colour of his eyes, and where they look while he wreaks his magic upon her. Are his eyes heavy-lidded and half-closed while he works, or does he watch her expression? What must it be like for him, who must have hidden his face from the world for a very long time, to see the face of another partially obscured?

The Exarch draws her clit between his lips, sucking hard and flicking his tongue besides, and Adrienne finds she cannot quite focus on such matters any longer. She gasps his title as she nears the edge of reason, and somewhere past that moment of purest bliss, wonders idly how many others have spoken his title thus, and whether any have been granted the honour of calling his true name, instead.

He does not relent, still tasting of her with long, slow strokes of his tongue even as aftershocks course through her, leaving her jumpy and oversensitive. There is an inexplicable tenderness in it, but eventually, it proves well beyond too much to bear, and she pushes at his shoulder gently. He allows her to squirm out of his grasp, but not before leaving one last kiss at the apex of her thighs.

Once she’s caught her breath, Adrienne tugs at the front of his robes to draw him towards her, delighting in the surprising sweetness of his kiss. She has half a thought to tell him that she hadn’t expected he’d be like this, not in the slightest, not in any way, but there are far too many clothes between them, and she has never been a woman so easily sated.

“Will you disrobe for me?” she wonders sweetly, releasing her hold upon his robes to trace her fingers along the crystal at his throat. “Or is that a secret, too?”

There is no accusation in her tone, yet she feels him still against her. “It’s not,” he says hesitantly.

She takes his face between her hands, carefully, as she can’t be sure exactly where his eyes are. “You know,” she tells him at last, with the utmost gentleness, “I confess I hadn’t expected you to be so shy.”

“No?” he wonders with a nervous chuckle. “An old man who hides his face, under the most unexpected attentions of a beautiful and powerful woman who—it must be said--is considerably younger? I had never thought to question your intuition.”

Adrienne nearly laughs at the absurdity of it. “In my defense, I’d never have put it that way!” she cries, taken aback by the implication. “What about ‘the strong and steadfast leader of a city, the survivor of a cruel world’s fate, the…the summoner of souls across the rift between time and space?’” She runs her hand down his neck and over his shoulders, an action meant to soothe.

The Exarch is quiet for a long moment. She feels the tips of his fingers upon her cheek, cold, polished stone. “You would…have me disrobe?” he asks her uncertainly.

Adrienne lays her hand over his and presses her cheek into it. “Please?” she entreats him.

He will not deny her—he has said as much—and so perhaps she ought to have exercised greater care. Perhaps if she could see his face, could see the exact shade of the hesitancy she hears in his voice, she would have been more careful with him, would have chosen different words or known how best to assure him of her intent. But she has a long way to go yet before she can fully grasp the veracity of his earlier promise to her.

“As you wish,” he breathes, and pulls away. She hears the faint sounds of rustling cloth and clinking metal, feels him shift off of the bed, and imagines him folding his robe and laying it out neatly.

As he undoes what she assumes must be his sandals, Adrienne begins to tire of the limitations of her circumstances, and she struggles against a growing impatience that feels almost like sadness. Her mind starts to offer up troubling questions in the stillness: will she ever know why the Exarch hides his face? What grave and dangerous thing yet awaits them, unknown to her but perhaps not quite such a mystery to him, that compels him to such secrecy, that precludes him from taking what she has offered him without considerable complication?

What has he seen, what has he known, she wonders as she feels the bed shift beneath his weight, that has caused him to hesitate so at the notion of revealing his body to her, even when she cannot see him?

She reaches blindly for him and he catches her hands, and she wonders with a fresh note of sorrow how much of himself he will allow her to touch before he stays her hands. He draws both her hands up to his lips and kisses them with a sense of gravity that catches her attention. When he releases her, she brings her hands to rest upon his neck as he draws nearer, meaning to start from a place she has already seen and felt, but she quickly realizes he is trembling all over.

She arches up to kiss him clumsily. “I’m sorry,” she tells him hurriedly. “I shouldn’t have--”

He presses a finger to her lips. “No,” he tells her, with surprising warmth. “Pray, do not apologize. It is a simple thing you’ve asked of me, I am simply…it has—well. Truthfully,” she hears him swallow hard, feels the way his breath catches, “you would be the first.”

It is with far greater care, then, that Adrienne allows her fingertips to travel along the span of his shoulders, again marveling at how surprisingly broad and well-muscled they are. As she could have guessed, crystal creeps across his flesh in strange and indiscernible patterns, and she is eager to map them all with her hands.

“I confess I was wondering,” she says, hushed, as though her words alone might shatter some unspoken thing that hangs precariously in the air between them, “with not a little jealousy, how many others might have had the honour.”

Her words have the desired effect: they startle a laugh out of him. “Jealousy?” he echoes, disbelieving.

“Mhm.” Her fingers trace the pronounced bone of his hip, half-cut with crystal, then begin to play at the band of his smallclothes. Truthfully, she isn’t expecting to be allowed to continue, expects him to catch her hands or shy away, but a strangled sound escapes his throat when she touches him through the fabric, and he buries his face in the crook of her neck as though utterly overwhelmed.

Her touch is clumsy and searching at first, quickly overtaken by delighted curiosity. “Gods,” she murmurs as she curls her fingers around him, suddenly aching for him as though she hadn’t just known the pleasure of his mouth upon her. Her other hand travels to the expanse of his back, following jagged lines of crystal and pressing gently into the tension she can feel him holding there, meaning to soothe him. But his whole body is held far too still, and she can barely feel him breathing against her shoulder.

“Exarch?” She’s not quite willing to let go of him, but she lightens her touch.

He takes in a shaky breath, rising on his elbows. The rush of cool air alerts Adrienne to just the faintest bit of wetness upon her collarbone. Is he crying? _Oh_ , Adrienne thinks, dread sinking into the pit of her stomach as she moves clumsily to take his face between her hands, perhaps she has presumed far, far too much. Perhaps she has erred far more than she has realized, in her quest to forget herself for a few blessed moments. The truth of the matter is that she does not know this man, cannot hope to know more than a fraction of the burden he bears, and she has ignored the signs he has given that she ought to take care with him.

“Forgive me,” he whispers, his anguish like a blade through her heart. “I was—I _am_ overwhelmed. That you should have any desire for me at all is—unfathomable. I do not deserve it, not your kindness, nor your attention, nor less your touch, and yet I can’t--”

Adrienne pulls him into a gentle kiss, then another. “You’ve nothing to be sorry for,” she tells him. “I should be begging your forgiveness, I think. But--” she presses a finger to his lips to halt his protestation, “—if it’s merely a matter of doubting my desire for you, then I should be only too happy to reassure you.”

“Please,” the Exarch catches her hand in his, sounding faintly alarmed at the notion, “I—you are too kind, truly, but I don’t think I could bear it.”

Adrienne threads her fingers through his and squeezes his hand gently. “Tell me what you want, Exarch,” she says, as kindly as possible, lest he mistake her meaning. “Tell me what you need.”

He inhales slowly, deeply. He presses her hand into the sheets, then takes the other and guides it back down his body. For a mercy, he is no longer obviously trembling. “Have I—would you…touch me, again?”

Guided by his hand, and without saying anything, she does. Her fears are somewhat assuaged by the way she can hear his breathing begin to build naturally, not gasping against her like a drowning man. His hand grows unsteady on hers in a way that is far more natural, and he leans in to capture her lips with renewed fervor as he begins to move subtly against her.

 _Take me_ , she wants to beg of him, or _oh, how I want you_ , she longs to assure him, but he has asked her not to overwhelm him, and so she is determined to master her own impatience.

He surprises her yet again when he is the one to break the silence. “Do you know,” he breathes, low and rich with emotion, “how I have _longed_ for you?” 

His words resonate within her very bones. She shivers. “Tell me.”

“That you would touch me like this,” he continues, “that you would want me, even like this is—“ he gasps and presses himself into her hand. “I had never even dared to _dream_ …”

Deprived as she is of her vision, she is reminded of the way his voice sounded when he called to her across the rift, at once terrifying and achingly familiar. She was sure she had heard his voice somewhere before, she remembers now, but she had chalked the feeling up to the power his voice can wield, the way she swears she can feel every word in her soul.

“Please,” she chokes out, unable to stop herself from arching up into him. He’s still got her other hand pinned to the bed, and she doesn’t mean to fight him, exactly, but _by the Twelve_ , this is so much more than she could ever have anticipated, and yet it is not nearly enough.

The Exarch captures her lips fiercely. “There is nothing I would deny you,” he swears against her lips. “I would give you anything, tell you everything, if I could.”

Though she can’t possibly know what he means, her heart aches for him all the same. It’s--bizarre, and very nearly terrifying, to hear such heady promises from such a voice as his, all while shrouded in darkness. Part of her wants to make light, to distract him with the matter at hand, while another yearns to hear more, cannot bear the thought of hearing anything else.

“Whatever happens,” the fingertips of his free hand trace the curve of her jaw, the angle of her collarbone, the dip of her waist, “please, know that this is true.”

Adrienne believes him, for the same reason she has chosen to believe him from the start—because she desperately wants to.

“I won’t ask you for much,” she tells him. _Won’t_ , she says, for she would like nothing more than to ask, to uncover the meaning behind his fevered words, to behold with eyes unclouded the glory and the danger of the precipice to which she has led them. “Just be here with me, just for tonight,” she continues, and though her words are measured, she feels as though she is on the verge of begging. “We’ll worry about tomorrow when it comes.”

She feels a stuttering breath against her lips, somewhere between a laugh and a sob. The Exarch captures her lips again, fierce and desperate. “Yes,” he breathes, so quietly she is sure she’d have missed it if he were any farther away. “Yes, we’ll—we’ll do that.”

His fingers dig into her hip, and he presses himself against her deliciously. He kisses her again, quickly, then once more before he releases his grip on her, and she feels the bed shift as he parts with his smallclothes at long last.

Gods, what she would give to be able to see him now, bare before her, silhouetted in moonlight. She comforts herself with his whispered words as she reaches out blindly for him, the promise that he would tell her everything if he could, the suggestion that he might be inspired to sing when the last Lightwarden falls. 

She will do it for him, she decides, for this kind and enigmatic stranger who has never doubted that she would succeed. When terror grips her, when she feels dizzy and sick from the light her body holds at bay, when she wonders whether this is truly to be her end, her last great act in such a short expanse of years before she is inevitably torn asunder, she will stand tall and she will face her duty with dignity, and she will dream of a place and a time where the Crystal Exarch will not hide from her any longer.

Is it so much to ask, really? Could she claim such a simple thing for herself, after all she has endured?

The Exarch’s callused fingers are almost as cold as the ones shrouded in crystal, and Adrienne shivers at his touch. He drags his fingertips over her belly and down between her legs, taking in a quiet gasp. “You’re—“ he breathes. “Gods…”

And then she feels him against her, parting her, pressing into her, and the cry that escapes her feels like it has come from someone else’s throat. It reverberates in the room as though in a cavern or a cathedral. If she were feeling more herself, she might have been embarrassed.

“Is this…?” he asks her, and she can feel him shaking from the strain of moving with such agonizing slowness.

“Gods, yes,” she says. “Just---come closer, _please_.”

He obliges her, somewhat haltingly, and in doing so moves deeper inside her. She swears softly, doing her level best not to claw at his back to draw him flush against her. He moves in her again, subtly, and she breathes his title like an invocation.

“Adrienne,” he whispers into her shoulder, his voice all but broken, and she realizes with a pang that he’s never once called her by her given name before this moment. 

She feels tears prickling at the corners of her eyes. Never has she known a greater longing to be able to offer his given name in return. She wonders how he has managed it, what it is about him that has granted her this gift: to set aside the mantle of Warrior, bringer of Light or of Darkness. To be nothing more or less than herself, than Adrienne, if only for a night, and if only with her world cast in shadow.

Adrienne wraps her arms tightly around the Exarch’s shoulders, breathing him in to steady herself. He is both warm and cold against her, his body hard and unyielding, his lips achingly soft at her shoulder. She can feel the faintest brush of his hair against her skin, can feel his eyelashes brush her cheek as he turns to whisper, “Like this?”

“Perfect,” she tells him. There is no escaping the tremor in her voice. “You’re perfect.”

He chuckles breathlessly into her skin and she presses a kiss somewhere around his temple. A lock of his hair has fallen free, smooth and longer than she’d have guessed, damp with sweat. He’s begun moving in her again, so slowly it’s like to drive her to madness. He takes her in his arms, holding her body flush against his as he buries himself fully in her at last. 

She does not possess half the Exarch’s eloquence--indeed, words do not come easily to her even when she is not compromised thus. Oh, how she longs to put voice to even a little of all that’s on her mind just now! Instead, she merely holds him impossibly tighter against her, and when he asks her again, “Is it all right? Can I…?”

“Gods, _please_ , fuck me,” she rasps. And perhaps her words are not particularly eloquent, nor do they encapsulate even a fraction of all she’d like to tell him, but in the moment, they prove more than sufficient in conveying her meaning.

He takes her up in his arms as he begins to move in earnest, his breath coming in ragged gasps against her neck. She hadn’t realized how close she was from the anticipation alone. Another climax builds low in her belly, and her need for release feels more like despair than ardour.

“You feel so good—never thought—don’t _deserve_ —“ the Exarch breathes into her neck, and she lets out a quiet sob when she comes, holding him impossibly tighter. She can feel the strange hollowness of primordial Light tugging at the edges of her consciousness, and vulnerable as she is, it terrifies her in a way it never has before.

With some effort, the Exarch stills within her. She feels him trying to pull away to look at her and holds him fast. “Are you all right?” he asks her, alarmed.

“Don’t stop,” she begs him, squeezing her eyes closed even behind her blindfold. “Please, don’t stop!”

She doesn’t know how he reads the emotion in her voice just then. She doesn’t care. As he has promised, he does not deny her. His hands find her hips as he picks up his pace, and she’s sure she’ll reach her peak yet again even before he drags the cold, polished stone of his right hand over her stomach to draw unsteady circles over her clit.

She screams, she thinks, though the sound feels distant and foreign, and when the Exarch lets out his own strangled cry, he doesn’t seem to mind that she cradles the back of his head in her hands, and feels how his long, silken hair is drawn back into a braid.

Silence settles over them then, strangely peaceful. Adrienne hums with contentment as little aftershocks course through her and inexplicable tingles of pleasure wash over her in a gentle wave.

“I—you’re sure you’re all right?” the Exarch asks her breathlessly. Her arms fall away from him, pleasantly heavy, and he pushes himself up onto his elbows. She feels the fingertips of his left hand upon her cheek. “You were crying,” he says, taken aback, and she’s not sure whether he’s telling her or himself.

A little huff of laughter, something like pleased embarrassment, comes over her. “Not because of—I wasn’t--“ she begins, then laughs again, a little, at herself. With considerable effort, she lifts a hand, grasping vaguely at the Exarch’s forearm. She can feel the faint indentations left by the leather straps he wears.

“It felt good,” she tells him. “Really good. I’ve—never felt anything like it, to be honest. I was…just a little overwhelmed, that’s all.” She squeezes his arm. “In a good way, I mean.” It’s not a lie. Would that she could make it entirely the truth just by willing it to be so, that she could claw the terror of the Light from that blissful moment with words and wishes alone.

“Well,” the Exarch breathes after a moment. He sounds stunned, but there is a note of something decidedly positive in his voice. He traces the curve of her cheek, the slope of her ear, the angle of her jaw. “Something the esteemed Warrior of Light has never before experienced, is that it?” he continues, a shadow of that shy playfulness that had so captivated her what seems a long while ago now. “That is a compliment I shall take, I think.”

“Don’t let it go to your head,” she quips without thinking, but there’s far more fondness in her words than she had intended. An image flashes across her mind’s eye unbidden, an eccentric Miquo’te historian, handsome and so _fun_ but a little too young, who wore his heart on his sleeve and his long, silken hair in a braid at the nape of his neck.

The thought is such a shock to her system that it pushes her longing to keep the Exarch close against her to the back of her mind. “I’m going mad with this thing on,” she taps his arm.

Her voice comes out sharp, and the Exarch startles. “Of course,” he says, not a little sadly. He presses a kiss to Adrienne’s forehead before he withdraws, and Adrienne wishes rather fervently that she’d had half a thought before she’d spoken the words that tore him away from her.

“The moon is so bright tonight,” he observes as he dresses. “It’s quite beautiful, but I wonder whether it reminds the people of Norvrandt a bit too much of the endless Light.”

“Is that how you feel, when you look at it?” Adrienne wonders.

The Exarch returns to her side, sitting on the edge of the bed and touching her face gently before he moves to undo her makeshift blindfold. “A little, yes,” he says. 

Adrienne blinks as the room comes into focus.

“But I can also appreciate it for what it is,” the Exarch continues. He has readorned his robes somewhat lackadaisically. The fabric hangs loosely around his neck, revealing more of the crystal that has overtaken his collarbones, and she can still see a few stray locks of his hair peeking out from beneath his hood, cast in white from the moon and orange from the dying fire. He is smiling down at her, and though she cannot see his eyes, she can feel the warmth in his expression.

“I don’t suppose you can stay?” she ventures, reaching out to capture his hand.

His lips part. She remembers his fervent promises when her world was cast in darkness. “I’m afraid not,” he says at last, lacing his fingers with hers.

Adrienne inclines her head hopefully. “A little longer?”

The Exarch’s smile returns. “Of course,” he says.

Contented, Adrienne turns onto her side and draws his crystal hand closer to examine it properly. “What does it feel like?” she asks him, feeling suddenly very sleepy.

“Like…nothing, usually,” says the Exarch simply.

“It doesn’t hurt, does it?” she glances up at him.

“No,” he assures her, squeezing her hand as though to affirm the truth of it. He reclaims his hand and tugs at the blankets beneath her. “Aren’t you cold?”

“Oh, I suppose,” she sighs dramatically, though she hadn’t really thought about it until he brought it up. It’s very hard to will her body to move, and she allows the Exarch to tuck her in without protest, or even private embarrassment.

“I’m glad to see you’ll be getting some rest, for once,” he says with a touch of mirth.

Adrienne hums. “If only someone would tire me out so thoroughly more often,” she teases.

“Is that all it was?” the Exarch laughs quietly. “And here I thought you were simply prone to overworking yourself.”

“Perish the thought.” She thrusts her hand out from under the covers to take hold of his once more. Instead, he takes her proffered hand between both of his and begins rubbing soothing circles into her palm. A delicious shiver courses through her, and she hovers ever nearer to a blissful and, admittedly, a much-needed slumber.

Adrienne closes her eyes and lets out a sigh of deepest contentment as she loses herself in the sweetness of the Exarch’s touch. Later, she will wonder whether she might have dreamt the whole thing, but on the very edge of consciousness, she’s sure she hears him begin to sing softly. A sweeter voice she would swear she has never heard in all her days, though whether he is singing to her or to himself, she may never know.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello it seems I am continuing this LOL! At least one more chapter.

To say that Adrienne is eager for an excuse to steal a moment of the Exarch’s time might be a rather charitable understatement. For better or worse, she tends towards single-mindedness, and the events of the evening prior to their departure for Kholusia have given her much and more to ponder, with very little context through which to filter them.

Indeed, in a testament to her high spirits, she hums to herself as she goes about her search. It’s not a melody she readily recognizes—she can’t seem to remember where she picked it up. She expects to find the Exarch standing on the cliffside somewhere, lost in thought, looking out majestically over the world that lies at the bottom of the Ladder. She’ll tease him, she thinks, something about brooding in high places, and then she’ll see what fraction of his thoughts she’s able to wheedle out of him, and perhaps a normal, pleasant conversation will get her mind off of matters best discussed without the looming threat of total annihilation hanging over their heads.

When she catches sight of him on the ground, legs splayed at odd angles and head lolling to the side, all her thoughts flee her in an instant, and she is left cold and trembling. The world goes just a little paler around the edges.

“Exarch?” she calls, falling to her knees and reaching out to shake him. “Exarch!”

He inhales softly, mutters something, and then startles visibly when he catches sight of her. “Forgive me,” he breathes, “I was…lost in a dream.”

Adrienne squeezes his shoulder. The urge to cup his face in her hand is very nearly irresistible. “Are you all right?”

He tells her, in a voice soft and feeble, what she could perhaps have guessed, but has never noticed. _An old man who hides his face_ , he had called himself, as though he were some frail and faltering thing, but she has never seen so much as an inkling of it until now. It is the influence of the Crystal Tower upon his body that keeps him strong, that gives him life, and for the first time in their acquaintance, Adrienne gets the sense that the natural span of his life might otherwise have run its course a much longer time ago than she could ever have guessed.

She feels quite lucky to know him in this moment, bizarre though the circumstances of their meeting may have been, and has half a mind to tell him so.

“How goes the construction effort?” he asks her.

She pushes the absurdly sentimental notion aside and makes to stand, assuming he’ll want to get back to the matter at hand. “Nearly finished, I think,” she says.

“Then this may be the last moment we have to ourselves,” says the Exarch, to her surprise. “Come. Sit with me?”

Adrienne hesitates, eyeing the empty space next to him, not because she doesn’t want to sit with him, but because she realizes how very much she does. “All right,” she says at last.

“Tell me,” says the Exarch, “what will you do, when this is over?”

Adrienne lets out a little laugh. “Same thing I always do, I suppose. Seek out my next adversary. Plan on doing one thing and then get roped into something else.”

“In a hundred years, no one had come close to ridding us of even a single Lightwarden, yet already you yearn for the next challenge?” The Exarch chuckles, with easy fondness. “You truly are a world apart from us all.”

It isn’t uncommon praise, especially from him, but Adrienne feels herself blushing all the same. He continues extolling her virtues, and something begins to clench within her chest. It sounds like he is saying goodbye, and perhaps he is, in a way. Their journey is coming to a head, one way or another. She hasn’t really thought about what comes after.

“What about you?” she asks him, when he falls silent.

The question follows logically, and yet the Exarch stiffens and hesitates, as though caught off-guard. “When this is over?” he asks, needlessly, nervously. “Indeed…”

He turns his face away, bows his head low, so that the shadow of his cowl fully obscures his face from her. “I once told you that there are things we can ill afford to lose,” he begins slowly. “’Things’, I said, though in truth, I spoke of a person.”

He speaks slowly, cautiously, weaving for her a tale of deepest devotion. When this is over, he tells her, when all his work is done, his greatest wish is simply to be with the woman he so clearly loves, to speak freely with her, and to go on marvelous adventures together.

Suddenly everything falls into place. Adrienne’s heart fairly aches with longing, with guilt, and with misplaced jealousy. But of course it all makes sense now. All his whispered words of ardour and devotion bordering on worship had not been for her, but for another, one he cannot have--at least, not until the last Lightwarden is felled.

He must see a shadow of the familiar in Adrienne, something that reminds him of his love. Perhaps it’s merely that she is also a warrior and an adventurer by nature, prone to journeying off where he would dearly love to follow. Adrienne swallows hard against a wave of grief for the faintest glimmer of something she has never known, and had never thought to want.

 _Of course_ , she tells herself again and again. Of course it hadn’t been for her. How could it be? It doesn’t even make sense. And what in the seven hells is wrong with her, getting all worked up over someone she barely knows? It’s stupid. The whole thing was stupid. She has other matters to worry about.

“It all makes so much more sense now,” she tells him, in a poor attempt at levity. “I do hope your mysterious friend knows how lucky she is.”

“What?” the Exarch startles.

“I don’t mean to make light,” Adrienne clarifies gently, holding her hand to her heart. “The depth of your affection is admirable, truly--enviable, even. I…well.” _I’ve never known anything like it_ , she almost tells him, but the words catch in her throat, and she is trying to be gracious. She reaches out and squeezes his arm. “I hope you’ll tell her all of that, when the time comes.”

She makes to stand and offers her hand to help him to his feet. Foolishly, she had thought to ask him for a parting kiss, meaning to insist that it was to ensure good fortune in the coming battle, but in light of what he has revealed to her, the idea is far too cruel and selfish to abide.

The Exarch gazes up at her for a moment before he takes her hand, and he leans heavily upon his staff as he stands. If Adrienne weren’t caught up in nonsensical moping, she would have helped him along. As it is, they return to Amity walking several fulms apart, in utter silence.

Adrienne will be _fine_ , she assures herself, with not a little disparagement. It serves her right, getting her hopes up over something that was just a little too good to be true. When this wretched business is finished, assuming she doesn’t die or turn into an abomination, she resolves to hunt down this mystery woman and tell her exactly how fortunate she is, tell her to be kind to this sweet man; else she will have the Warrior of Darkness to reckon with.

The promise of a difficult task ahead has never been more welcome.

* * *

_Til then, I bid you farewell…eater._

Somewhere amidst dark and terrible dreams, there is a memory.

“Adrienne? Wake up, Adrienne, just for a bit.”

Adrienne had always known Sophiane, her mother’s sister, as a stern and sad woman. As she grew older, she started to understand that her aunt had been angry with her mother. Adrienne supposed she might have been angry with her mother, too, if she’d been a bit older when it happened.

“You need to eat something,” Sophiane insisted, helping her to sit up and pressing a bowl of broth into her shaking hands.

Adrienne’s throat was raw. Her chest ached from coughing, her stomach roiled, and she was somehow both hot and cold all at once. “Am I going to die?” she asked, in the way of a frightened child who had never been so sick before.

Sophiane afforded her a rare, wry smile. “Don’t be silly. I’d say the worst is over now. Drink your soup.”

It didn’t taste like anything, but it soothed her throat and warmed her insides. “Thank you,” she said, feeling suddenly much further from whatever a child imagines must be the doorstep of death.

Sophiane smoothed Adrienne’s hair away from her face, and the usual sorrow settled about her eyes.

“What’s the matter?” Adrienne asked her.

Sophiane shook her head. “Forgive me,” she said softly. “You’re starting to look so much like her.”

Adrienne averted her gaze and busied herself by taking another drink of her soup. “Will you…tell me something about her?” she ventured cautiously.

Sophiane inhaled, hesitated. “I never understood what she saw in that man,” she began, though the statement lacked its usual bite.

 _That man_ was code for Adrienne’s father. Throughout her life, she had received many contradictory accounts of the man in question. Most seemed to agree that he was fun, but flighty, not cruel, but certainly not possessed of a particularly noble heart, and that his sudden departure from the modest underground settlement called New Gelmorra had come as a surprise to none save Adrienne’s mother.

“She always seemed to see the best in people,” Sophiane continued, frowning subtly and looking away. “I don’t know that I’d say I admired her for it, but I did envy it sometimes. I think she lived in a kinder world than the rest of us.”

Sophiane returned the full force of her attention, the full force of her grief, upon Adrienne once more. “But make no mistake, Adrienne,” she said severely, her pale eyes shining like steel in the dim light from the fire. “The world is cruel, and people are selfish.”

Adrienne finished her soup in contemplative silence. Sophiane retrieved the bowl and departed with nothing but a terse, “Get some rest.”

In the present, Adrienne wakes feeling every bit as sick, as alone, as lost as she had all those years ago. There is no one to wake her now, no one to bring her hot soup and wave away her fears as though they were trifling things.

Well, except for the ghost who haunts her room, and he is anything but reassuring even on his best days.

“Ryne did what she could for you,” he tells her, “but of course she’s only delayed the inevitable.”

She wonders what her Aunt Sophiane would say to her now—now that she _is_ going to die, and the best she can hope for is that she doesn’t bring the whole world down with her.

The people of the Crystarium are as kind and resilient as ever. What must it be like for them, she wonders miserably, to have the night sky returned at long last, only to have it snatched away again? No one knows, Ardbert had told her. No one knows that it is because of her.

Katliss, who works in the Crystalline Mean, and who is called an Elf on this shard, suggests the watchtower near the rookery for a good place to get some air. “This damnable sky doesn’t make the most soothing scenery,” she concedes, with only the barest sliver of sorrow in her voice, “but the Exarch often liked to stand there and feel the wind upon his face.”

“Oh,” Adrienne breathes, deflating. “Right. Thanks.”

The Crystal Exarch. What do the people of the Crystarium know about _that_ , she wonders?

She has half a mind to sit, to fall to the ground under the sheer weight of it, and it is that very impulse that keeps her moving. Of course, she thinks with distant fondness as she ascends flight after flight of metal stairs, he’d take to brooding up in the highest place he could find. It’s a good thing no one ever thought to mention that before, or she’d have found him out in an instant.

She leans heavily on the railing when at last she arrives. Before it always felt good to exert herself when she was feeling conflicted, something about getting out of her head and back into her body, but now that her body is at least halfway to betraying her, there is no relief to be found. She breathes in, but the air has gone stale and stifling with the return of the everlasting Light.

She sits. She cradles her head in her hands.

“Oh!” comes an echo from the past. Gods, it feels like it was so _long_ ago. “I thought you’d have gone back into town by now.”

Adrienne bit the inside of her cheek. She didn’t want to be in town. There was a heavy sadness that hung about the Scions after Moenbryda’s death, one that both did and did not belong to her. “Needed a change of scenery,” she said at last, feigning lightness with debatable success. “Were you hoping to have the night all to yourself?”

Even if G’raha Tia’s striking red eye did not seem to glow of its own accord from where he tried to hide it behind the curtain of his hair, he was so expressive that it was hard not to notice anything about him. He startled at her words and struggled visibly to school his expression into neutrality. “Make no mistake,” he said, with a small and reserved smile, “I am glad to see you still here. That is—I certainly don’t mind the company.”

Adrienne patted the empty space next to her, poorly concealing her amusement. “Then come,” she said. “Sit with me?”

G’raha hesitated a moment, then approached cautiously, taking the seat she offered. In addition to offering her a glimpse into the minds of others, the Echo renders Adrienne’s own memories sharp and achingly clear. She can almost feel the chilly night breeze against her skin, and the warmth G’raha brought with him when he sat close to her.

“What will you do, when this is over?” she wondered, returning her gaze to the fire. 

She wasn’t sure what sort of answer she was looking for. Would he return to Sharlayan? She found she rather liked the idea that he might stay here, where she might see him again, but that seemed like a strange thing to say. They didn’t know one another all that well, and there were plenty of other people Adrienne had met in the course of her travels, liked well enough, and made peace with never seeing again.

“I should think whatever we uncover within Syrcus Tower will occupy my time for a long while,” said G’raha. “As observing is all Cid and Rammbroes seem to want me to do, I dearly _hope_ I’ll be permitted to stay and study the tower and its artifacts to my heart’s content.”

“You think anyone would stop you?” Adrienne wondered, surprised.

G’raha rolled his eyes and scoffed. It was—oddly charming, and Adrienne very nearly physically shook herself for thinking so.

“Oh, I just know things never work out quite the way we want them to,” he said, with a touch of sadness in his voice that felt a little too heavy for the topic at hand. “Rest assured I am prepared to put up an honest fight, at the very least.”

“I’d expect no less,” Adrienne laughed fondly, leaning over to knock her shoulder against his. “I confess I don’t mind the idea that you’d stick around for awhile.”

“Oh?” G’raha turned to face her.

Adrienne focused her attention upon digging the toe of her boot into the dirt at her feet. These sorts of words had never come easily to her. The caring she had always known was terse and formal at best. “You’ve been—very pleasant company,” she began haltingly. “I’d—miss you, if you left.” She shrugged.

“You know,” said G’raha quietly, somewhere between awe and amusement, “I think that might be the kindest compliment I’ve ever been paid.”

Adrienne looked up, taken aback. She hadn’t realized he was leaning quite so close, and she had never expected the full force of his striking eyes by moonlight. “You should be paid kinder compliments, then,” she told him seriously.

His features relaxed into a smile, youthful and sweet. “I think I’d like that,” he said shyly, “but only if they came from you.”

If things had been different, she might have kissed him. She thought about it, she realizes now. For a split second, the idea of it shot through her, and it came as such a shock that she recoiled from it, too afraid of all it might mean, of all it might _change_ to even consider it properly.

Instead, she pushed him away with a laugh, fond but with a cutting edge. “Oh, shut up.”

So, where does that leave her now?

Now that she has kissed him, now that she’s done a fair bit more than that, all without even realizing—

“The people of this city have spirit, I’ll give them that,” says Ardbert over her shoulder, forcing levity.

It’s all Adrienne can do not to snap at him. He’s got nowhere else to go, she reminds herself, and he’s got nearly as much of a stake in this as she has, excepting the fact that he has already died. Feo Ul is a far more welcome presence, although no one seems to be in the business of speaking words of much comfort today.

_See yourself as he saw you._

The memory returns with a vengeance, smarting like a fresh injury, the mysterious Exarch’s whispered words of devotion and the inexplicable pain when Adrienne had realized they could not possibly be for her. Now she cannot rightly say which is worse—thinking his heart belonged to someone else, or being forced to accept that it does not, that all he said, all he promised, all he wished, was indeed for her. _My inspiration_ , he called her, the words he had intended to be his last.

It is difficult to reconcile the Crystal Exarch with her memory of G’raha Tia, though she imagines the signs would be everywhere, were she to go looking for them. She has come to know the Exarch exactly as she described him—as the strong and steadfast leader of a city, the survivor of a cruel world’s fate, and the summoner of souls across the rift—but also as unfailingly steady, patient, and gentle. Though she could certainly have envisioned G’raha Tia growing up to wield considerable power and influence through the sheer force of his will, she would have fully expected the Exarch’s subtler qualities to elude him, or at best to be merely an act.

Therein lies another question: how much of it was an act?

Urged on by Feo Ul’s words, Adrienne asks around about the Exarch, though what exactly she’s hoping to uncover is anyone’s guess. Unwittingly, the people of the Crystarium put at least a fraction of her worries to rest. They all speak of the Exarch with reverent fondness, and not even Moren the Librarian knows any more about him than she did not a few days prior. She realizes that she had feared her judgement lacking, or that perhaps she hadn’t been paying nearly enough attention.

Eventually she is directed to Captain Lyna. If she’d learned that the Exarch had seen to Lyna’s upbringing before she’d known of his true identity, perhaps it wouldn’t have come as such a shock. As it stands, she guesses Lyna must have at least a decade or two on her, and it just adds to the strangeness of the knowledge that her young friend has led a very long life without her.

Lyna expresses her concern for the Exarch, and, not unlike the rest of the Crystarium’s citizens, her trust in him despite his secrets. Then, without so much as a hesitation, she offers Adrienne the key to the very heart of the tower, where none save the Exarch have ever been permitted to enter. It is a far more straightforward answer than Adrienne was expecting.

“It isn’t the exact emergency he described when he gave the key to me, but I suspect the city will be in far greater danger if you do not gain the knowledge you seek. And anyway—“ Lyna amends, turning to lead the way back to the tower, “—if he were to entrust his secrets to anyone, I have no doubt that it would be you.”

If she, too, burns for answers, she hardly shows it. Adrienne finds cause to wonder how many among Norvrandt’s citizens would give their all for the barest glimpse into the mystery of the Crystal Exarch. Lyna unlocks the door to the heart of the tower and excuses herself with a few terse words, and then Adrienne is alone, and the world is unbearably quiet.

There are haphazard piles of books everywhere, as was perhaps to be expected. She imagines the Exarch knows where each one is when he needs it, and wonders whether G’raha Tia was the same. She wonders whether G’raha ever had such a place to call his own, where he might accumulate books and pile them as he pleased.

Before she can even think of where to begin, however, the world goes white around the edges, and Adrienne feels a pang of cold terror before she realizes that it is not the Light, but the Echo.

She can get a clearer look at him now, older and cut with crystal, but unmistakable. Her heart rends in her chest at the sight of him, and she is overcome with longing to reach out and touch what is not actually there. With a start, she notices Urianger only when he speaks, and thus does the tale of G’raha Tia’s journey begin to unfold before her.

For as much anguish as it has brought her, the Echo is a tremendous gift, for it grants her the ability to slow down and _think_ , to really take in what is being said, when otherwise she’d likely have missed the better part of it even if it were spoken to her directly.

A hundred years of hard, thankless work, of solitude, of purest devotion—these are all utterly foreign to her, by virtue of her relative youth if for no other reason. That the reflection of G’raha Tia should have borne this burden, that he should so plainly state that he had done it all with her foremost in his mind? That his intention for all those long, lonely years had always been to sacrifice his own life so that Adrienne might be granted a second chance at hers?

_There are…things we can ill afford to lose._

It is more than she can fathom, even with the aid of the Echo. Adrienne sinks to her knees, overwhelmed, as the empty room comes back into focus.

“Careful, now.” Well, not empty. “If you lose control again, the light could claim you for good. Although--” Ardbert continues, inexplicably “—it’s probably only a matter of time—“

“You know, it’s lucky you’re already dead,” Adrienne snaps, “because you’re on my last nerve.”

Ardbert is undeterred. “So? What do you mean to do?”

Adrienne rubs at her temple, though she knows well that the ache of the Echo cannot be soothed so easily. She returns her gaze to the empty space where the Exarch had been. She sighs heavily. The questions that plague her don’t mean anything if G’raha Tia is dead, still less if the rest of the world dies with him. “I guess I have to go and rescue the stupid Exarch, don’t I?”

Ardbert lets out a little huff of laughter. “Then let’s be on our way,” he says simply.

She hates him a little bit less now. She thinks if her Aunt Sophiane were here, it’s what she might have said, too. The world might be cruel, but people are not always selfish.

* * *

When they wash up on the shore of Kholusia, Adrienne all but scoops the Exarch up out of the sea and into her arms. He leans heavily upon her for support all the way back to the Crystarium, but in his defense, Adrienne is also wholly unwilling to let go of him. They don’t speak much—they are all well beyond exhausted, and Adrienne has already waved off the Exarch’s feeble protestations with ease—but the cheers and well wishes of the people of Norvrandt as they pass go a long way towards lifting their spirits.

Once they are safely back in the glow of the tower, Adrienne can feel the Exarch’s strength returning to him. People begin to swarm around them, loud and happy and awestruck, not least by the newly-revealed visage of their beloved Crystal Exarch, and so Adrienne does not feel quite so badly for refusing to relinquish her hold on him. She doesn’t know what it would be like to hide her face from the world for the better part of a century, but she can guess he might be just the slightest bit overwhelmed.

The Scions agree that a wash and a brief respite are in order before what is sure to be a long night of celebration, and the Exarch assures them that the manager of the Pendants will be overjoyed to accommodate them. Though he sounds more or less his usual self, Adrienne has not loosened her grip upon him in the slightest, and she insists upon half-carrying him up the stairs to the gates of the Crystal Tower.

“I hope you’ll be taking this time to get some rest, yourself,” she says. She hardly recognizes the tone in her own voice.

The Exarch—G’raha Tia—lets out a breathy chuckle. “You really needn’t worry over me,” he says, though he does not sound remotely displeased.

“That’s not a yes.”

He looks up at her with a gentle kind of awe about him. “And what of you, O Warrior of Darkness?” he wonders. “Will you take your rest, as ordered?”

Adrienne averts her gaze, biting the inside of her cheek and struggling with a most unwelcome cacophony of emotions. “Sorry,” she says, at last releasing her death grip upon the Exarch’s shoulders. Inwardly, she reminds herself rather harshly that although he might be G’raha Tia, he is still a far cry from the young man she once knew, and it has been a _very_ long time since she was familiar to him.

“I was just… Sorry,” she repeats. “Will I…see you later?”

The Exarch smiles in his usual way, reserved and enigmatic even now that she can see his eyes, even now that she can see the face she once knew. “Of course.”

 _Promise?_ She very nearly demands, but--

_There is nothing I would deny you._

Adrienne glances down at him again, feeling anxious, like if she looks away for too long, he’ll be gone, or he’ll be hidden beneath the hood again, or this whole thing will have been a very vivid, very exhausting dream.

“Get some rest, my friend,” says the Exarch, warm but distant. “You of all people have earned it.”

The Dossal Gate closes behind him, and Adrienne is certain it hurts almost as much as it did the first time.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have had this on repeat for like 3 days which is normal but idk I just think it fits so well! <https://youtu.be/49Og75MrkV8> The referenced song is "The Road Home" by Stephen Paulus. Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you will enjoy the conclusion of this particular nonsense!

It is truly a beautiful night, one befitting such a celebration.

G’raha Tia cannot bear to look upon it.

There is no sense in wearing the hood any longer—half of all Norvrandt must have seen his face by now—and yet, without it, the world is bright and loud and too close, and he cannot catch his breath.

He’d have liked to stay locked up in the Tower for the night, or perhaps for the rest of his miserable existence. A voice in the back of his mind screams without cease that he should not be alive at all, that he risks unraveling the very fabric of time by continuing to exist, that he risks undoing all he has labored for these many long years by clinging selfishly to his own life.

Perhaps he would have heeded the voice, if things were different. It would be an easy thing to end his life and set everything right again. But Adrienne had asked him if she would see him tonight, reluctant even to free him from her grasp until he acquiesced, and he has already told her a lifetime’s worth of lies.

Principle aside, she had been so _happy_ to see him. There is very little in this world he would not gladly endure if it means she might look at him that way again.

So, resolved to put his own existential despair aside, at least for the evening, the Crystal Exarch makes his appearance without his hood. It is almost immediately too much to bear. Everyone is so kind, full to bursting with well wishes and, though the night is young yet, already a bit too much in the way of wine and spirits. The Exarch accepts a drink, thinking to soothe his nerves, but there seems to be no quiet corner where he can claim sanctuary and remain unnoticed.

As the Scions begin to arrive, drowsy, clean, and happy, G’raha pointedly avoids them. When he does not see Adrienne among them for the better part of a bell, he steals away to the upper balconies. There will be less light, less noise, and far fewer people up there, and he’ll be able to check periodically to see whether she has made an appearance.

The chill of the night air is soothing in its way, and he gasps it in as though he has been suffocating. He can still feel the crowd down below as though it is threatening to rise up and swallow him, and wonders exactly how ridiculous it would be if he continued to wear the hood, after all. He is suddenly acutely aware of his ears, and the way people used to tease him for how they gave away his every emotion. He wonders with growing dread what the people of Norvrandt must think of the strange hue of his eyes, and whether their reverence for the Crystal Exarch will hold now that he has been unveiled to them.

“I thought I was crazy, you know,” comes a voice from the stairs. G’raha is so miserable that he barely reacts to the sound. “Thinking your voice sounded familiar, feeling the way you kept your hair in a braid…”

The memory flashes across his mind’s eye unbidden, his vision gone dark in a moment of purest bliss, the taste of her skin, her sweet voice in his ear, and her hand cradling the back of his head as he lost himself in her. Guilt crashes over him with the force of a wave, and he is a drowning man once more. A strangled sound escapes his throat, and he leans heavily upon the railing.

“Are you ready to hear my apology now?” he wonders sharply. There is anger in his voice. Distantly he hopes Adrienne realizes it is only for himself. “I confess, I have several versions, although I never expected to live long enough to deliver them in person.”

“Oh, I—“ Adrienne falters, and her unexpected softness is as a blade through his heart. “I wasn’t being serious. I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry,” G’raha chokes out. It is very nearly a sob.

He feels rather than hears her draw nearer, feels the way she hesitates before she lays a hand lightly upon his shoulder. Countless other torments he had expected to endure over the course of these many long years, had endured willingly and with enthusiasm, even, precisely because he had _known_ that he would never have to endure this. 

What must she think of him now, after everything? A pale imitation of the unimpressive wretch he once was. At least then he’d been young, an easy excuse for his selfishness, his pathetic pining after her. He wishes she would say what is obvious, number his flaws and his unforgivable errors and be done with him. It would be infinitely easier to languish in her hatred. It is how he had intended to die, after all.

“Shall I tell you what I was thinking, in Kholusia?” Her voice is achingly gentle. “When I’d decided your heart belonged to another?”

A fresh pang of humiliation courses through him. He imagines he will regret his words to her on the cliffside in Kholusia for the rest of his days. He was weak and tired beyond reason, sure that he had reached his final hour, more desperate than ever before for another moment of her time. He had to say _something_ to her before he went, he’d thought, even if his final actions would undo everything that came before.

It had been absurd, shocking, when she had misunderstood him so completely. It was only his overwhelming guilt for daring to say anything at all that stayed his tongue.

“I thought,” Adrienne continues, turning her attention up into the night sky, “that supposing I survived the coming battle, I was going to have to hunt down this _inspiration_ of yours, and make sure she was treating you well.”

This proves enough to startle G’raha into looking at her. She crosses her arms as though she is cold, and her brow furrows subtly. “I suppose it’s a bit easier, if it’s me,” she continues quietly. “At least I know where I am.”

G’raha opens his mouth to say something, but no words come. Adrienne turns to look at him, pale eyes glittering like the stars above them. “I can’t believe it’s you,” she breathes.

G’raha bows his head low. He feels his face flush, his ears fold back against his head, and longs for the safety of his cowl. “You’ve every right to be angry with me,” he says. Indeed, he would welcome it.

“Angry?” Adrienne echoes, taken aback. “Whatever for?”

G’raha looks up, stunned. “I summoned you and your friends here,” he begins bitterly, fury building rapidly within him, “leaving them stranded and bereft of their champion, only to set you against the Lightwardens knowing full well what might happen to you, fed you information only as it suited me, lied to you about myself, hid my face from you fully meaning to do so until my death, and as if that were not enough—!”

The memory of her leaning close to him, the warmth of her smile and the sweetness of her words, crashes over him again and again, a stormy sea of guilt beating against a rocky cliffside. He squeezes his eyes closed against it. “I took advantage of you in your hour of weakness,” he breathes. “I, who deserve nothing short of _revilement_ from you, allowed my desires to cloud my judgement. When you needed words of strength and encouragement, the listening ear of a friend, I who have always claimed I would give you _anything_ lacked the strength even to give you that.”

A moment of silence passes between them. The crowd below feels dim and distant. Adrienne inclines her head curiously. “Are you done?” she asks him. There is a curve to her lips, and a touch of amusement in her voice that cuts like a knife.

G’raha turns away from her, folding his arms across his chest. He doesn’t bother to wipe away the tears that form at the corners of his eyes.

“I think it’s safe to say we’ve all gotten past the initial summoning,” Adrienne begins slowly. “It’s the Scions’ job to tackle big, impossible, world-ending problems—we’re practically made for this sort of thing. As I told you before, I don’t resent you for needing me. Whatever anyone says, I was made aware of the risk. It was…scary.”

He dares a sidelong glance. The corner of her lip twists into a wry smile. “The scariest thing that’s ever happened to me, actually, which is saying quite a lot.”

G’raha has half a mind to reach out for her, but he reprimands himself privately for even daring to think of such a thing. It is his fault, after all, that she was forced to endure the Light, and it was his failure which very nearly cost her everything.

“It would have been much simpler, wouldn’t it,” she continues with a subtle frown, “to cast me into the void when the last Lightwarden fell?”

The question sends a shock of cold dread through him. He feels as though he’s been tossed into ice water. He inhales sharply, half-formed words catching in his throat. He could never, would never—the thought is so absurd, so _painful_ that he knows not how to begin to refute it.

But Adrienne continues, as though it were nothing. “I heard what you told Urianger,” she says, “in the Umbilicus. Through the Echo.” She taps her temple by way of explanation. “You did a great deal of this not only to save these two worlds, but to save…”

She trails off, lips still parted. Her frown deepens. She shrugs.

“I understand…bits and pieces of why you hid your face, I think,” she glances over at him. “I am glad to see it again now,” she tells him, almost shyly. It is so unexpected that G’raha very nearly fails to process it at all. He wonders how he must be looking at her now, caught somewhere between awe and horror.

“But I’d never thought to be angry at you for that. I think—” she hesitates, inclines her head thoughtfully. “I think it would be very difficult, painful, even, to live like that for so long—no one seeing your face or knowing your name, especially someone you once knew.”

She looks at him a moment, like she’s waiting for him to say something, but he would not know where to begin. A part of him is still screaming that she ought to be furious with him, that she is only being kind because she pities him, because she is glad he isn’t yet another death on her hands, and that when she realizes that, then the full force of her fury will descend upon him, and even that will be a fraction of what he deserves.

“As for the last bit,” Adrienne turns back to him, and he turns to face her in kind on pure instinct. “Assuming I’ve understood correctly, and there is no other woman for whom you wax poetic about adventure and inspiration?” she tilts her head and affords him a playful smile.

G’raha is sure his jaw goes slack for a moment. He averts his eyes, feeling suddenly very warm. “No,” he says. “You have the right of it.”

“Then,” she reaches out hesitantly, settles her hand upon his shoulder, “I think it is I who owe you the apology.”

“What?” G’raha startles. “No!”

Adrienne presses a finger to his lips. The gesture stuns him back into silence.

“I was careless with your affections,” she says. “I’d like to think I wouldn’t have been, if I’d known, but…” she averts her gaze, lets out a soft huff of laughter. “Evidence suggests otherwise. You deserve much better than that.”

G’raha wonders again exactly how ridiculous it would be to go back to hiding under his hood, to excuse himself and spend the rest of the night locked in the tower, _anything_ rather than continue to endure this from her. She has said her piece already without fully realizing it. It makes no difference now that she knows who he is, now that she knows his heart has always been hers to do with as she pleased, except that it puts her in a very awkward position, and that when at last she gets around to telling him a very gentle version of the truth—that he is very dear to her, that she is glad he is alive, but that is as far as it goes—it will kill him where he stands.

It serves him right, he tells himself. He deserves far worse, actually, for taking advantage of her kindness, for indulging himself in her ignorance, for deluding himself into thinking she could ever want him without the Exarch’s cloak and shadow.

He measures his words carefully, eager to avoid hurting her further, but unwilling to endure more needless sympathy. “Your kindness is appreciated, truly,” he begins. With considerable effort, he looks up into her eyes and he smiles. “But I am under no delusions regarding your own feelings, nor have I ever been. Truthfully, I’d never wanted you to know, precisely because I did not wish to put you in such a position. Please,” his voice breaks, but otherwise he thinks he does a rather masterful job of concealing his pain, “know that you owe me nothing, least of all an explanation.”

Adrienne inclines her head curiously. “Hm, see, there’s my difficulty,” she says, with a touch of mirth. “I think you are under some delusions.”

G’raha’s pretense of neutrality falls apart as quickly as he has assembled it. He balks at her, at a loss for any more words that will make her understand. “Am I,” he does not quite ask.

“Mhm.” Adrienne draws a lock of his hair between her fingers, brushing it away from his face and cupping his cheek in her hand. He inhales sharply, and he very nearly flinches away from her touch out of sheer overwhelm. He begins to wonder whether he has fallen asleep, after all.

Adrienne brings her other hand up to join the first, her thumb brushing over the crystal crawling up towards his eye. He looks up at her, plaintive and searching, and finds only unmistakable tenderness in her gaze.

“All those things you said, the night before we left for Kholusia,” she begins quietly, “were they true?”

“Every word,” he swears, immediately and without regret, lest she have any reason to think otherwise.

“Good.” She threads her fingers through his hair when she kisses him, and he decides he has definitely fallen asleep.

It is only a matter of time before he wakes. Only a matter of time before he is back in his study, asleep with his face pressed into an open book. Only a matter of time before she realizes her mistake and they are back at the start, circling, circling ever closer to what he knows she truly means—that he is very dear to her, that she is glad he is alive, but that is as far as it goes. That night before the events in Kholusia was, for her part, a mistake. Perhaps, charitably, a fling. Not unpleasant, just…relatively meaningless.

This is dangerous, he thinks as his hands find her waist. The longer he stays here, the harder it will be when it ends. The more he allows himself to believe, the longer the fall, the more broken pieces of himself he will have to pick up.

This cannot be real. Whatever this is, it is impossible.

“I suppose the celebration would have been a little overwhelming for you,” says Adrienne, not a breath away from his lips.

G’raha makes a vague, noncommittal hum of a response. If he were feeling more himself, he would have thought of something to say that didn’t require him to tell her that she is the only reason he has braved the event at all.

“Would you…like to go somewhere more private?” Adrienne ventures.

G’raha opens his eyes fully to look up at her. The set of her features is uncommonly soft. Vulnerable. Far too much to handle, and far too much to resist.

His tongue darts across his lips. “I wouldn’t want to keep you from the celebration of your own victory,” he manages, feebly, and without even the barest pretense of conviction.

Adrienne’s lips curl into a most charming grin. “How is it that you can be such a good liar sometimes, and such a terrible one at other times?”

In spite of himself, G’raha laughs. It is a weak and faltering sound. “The best lies contain a kernel of truth, do they not?” he counters.

“Oh,” Adrienne drawls, “so you’re saying there’s not even a tiny part of you that wishes I’d just leave you in peace?”

“Never,” G’raha tells her seriously.

“Then…?” Adrienne inclines her head, almost but not quite playful, and there’s that air of hesitation about her again. As though she thinks, in spite of everything, that there is any chance he would refuse her.

“The offer stands, by the way,” Adrienne continues suddenly, airily.

“What?” G’raha manages.

“You need only point me in the direction of your manifold admirers,” she says, “and I shall happily hunt them down and put the fear of the gods into them. Though I confess, now my goal might skew a bit more towards scaring them off altogether.”

Again he is startled into laughter. That he has entertained nonsensical daydreams of fighting for her affections, and far more recently than he’d care to admit, is perhaps a given. The notion of the reverse, while absurd in the extreme, is not without its charm. “Would you reproach me,” he wonders shyly, “if I told you I think I’d quite like to see that?”

She draws herself up to her full height only to afford him a dramatic bow. “Say the word, my lord.”

G’raha balks, pulling away from her. “None of that from you, _please_.”

“No?” Adrienne wonders innocently, but he can tell from the glimmer of mischief in her eyes that he has already said too much. “I confess I thought you might secretly like it, just a little.”

“I spent at least half a century trying to get people to _dispense_ with such formalities, to no avail, as you have surely noticed,” he replies wearily.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Exarch,” she says pleasantly. “Sometimes people call things as they see them.”

G’raha averts his gaze, draws his hands together bashfully in front of himself. She has graciously gifted him with a moment to collect himself, but her question hangs heavy and unanswered in the air between them still.

He takes in a deep breath and straightens his shoulders. “As to your…previous inquiry,” he begins, “I’m afraid the Tower offers little in the way of comfort. However, I would…it would be my _honour_ to entertain the esteemed Warrior of Darkness on the eve of her great victory,” he bows to her, “should that be her desire.”

“Well then,” says Adrienne breathlessly. She reaches out to take his arm. “Just one more question, _my lord Exarch_.”

He affords her a withering sidelong glance, but he rather doubts there is any real discouragement in his expression.

“How much do you care what people will say,” she wonders, “should we simply stroll through the heart of the Crystarium, disappear into the Tower, and fail to make another appearance for the rest of the evening?”

For a blissful moment, G’raha’s mind goes fuzzy around the edges. “I care not a whit,” he says airily, gesturing to himself. “I daresay it has ever been painfully obvious that the Exarch carries a torch for his hero, to all save the hero in question, of course. One does find cause to wonder what the Warrior of Darkness sees in him, however, when she could have nearly anyone on this star or any other at her whim.”

Adrienne laughs. “I don’t think anyone wonders what she sees in him,” she says, “save of course the Exarch, himself. You should have heard how people spoke of you, when I asked.”

“You asked?” he echoes stupidly, before he can think better of it.

Adrienne affords him a sidelong glance. “You’ll forgive me if I was a little confused after what happened on Mount Gulg,” she replies crisply, though there is no venom in her tone. “Part of me was sure I’d have seen it coming, if only I’d been paying attention.”

“It, meaning…”

“That you’d intended from the start to trade _your life_ for mine?” And this she says with some heat, with some sliver of anger. It is something of a relief to hear it.

“If you had known, if anyone had guessed,” he tells her, “you’d have tried to stop me.”

“Right you are,” says Adrienne quietly. Her grip on the crook of his elbow tightens subtly.

There is no guard at the Dossal Gate this evening. In truth, there needn’t ever be a guard posted there, as the better part of the inside of the Tower answers only to him. But it is not for the Crystal Exarch to tell the city guard what to do, and Lyna insists, as did her predecessor, and the one before that, that there be a guard.

“You…read Count Edmont’s account of the events in Ishgard, did you not?” Adrienne continues as the door closes behind them. She speaks softly, but her words echo in the Crystal Tower’s cavernous halls.

“I did,” says G’raha, uncomprehending. _Countless times_ , he does not add.

“Then,” she says, “I suppose you’ll have some idea of how things fell apart after…after we parted ways.”

G’raha inhales, hesitates. “Some idea, yes,” he says carefully. “But I should dearly like to hear it from you.”

The halls that lead to the place he has taken for his personal chambers are strange and winding. Adrienne’s hand drops lower, reaching for his. Memory supplies the feel of her hand in his where the crystal fails him—he had sat by her side for far too long after she fell asleep, humming a half-forgotten melody from his youth while he traced the lines of her palm and the faded scars all across her fingers.

“I really did miss you, you know,” she tells him quietly. “I hadn’t had a real friend in so long—I hardly even realized that until you were already gone. And then I didn’t even have the Scions anymore, just this—poor idiot child who was having an existential crisis, and how was I supposed to help him?”

“Alphinaud,” his memory supplies, and she lets out a soft noise of amusement.

“He’s come a long way,” says Adrienne fondly. “So we went to Lord Haurchefant, and…he took us in. Without hesitation, in spite of—everything. Did everything in his power to help us. And on top of all that,” she pauses, as though the words have caught in her throat. “On top of all that, he was a very good friend to me. I didn’t even realize how sorely I needed that.”

G’raha hazards a glance at her. She is smiling at first, but then her expression hardens abruptly.

“Then,” she continues sharply, “out of nowhere, he took a blow meant for me. I’d barely registered what was happening before he pushed me to the ground and stood up in front of me baring his shield, and this—“

She raises her free hand, curls it into a fist, and presses it into her chest. “This…beam of pure aether just—just shot right through him.”

Her lips part, but no sound comes out. She shakes her head and glances down at G’raha, half-attempting a smile. “I’m sorry,” she says. “You probably know all of this.”

_But not from you. Not like this._

“What I meant to say,” she continues, returning her attention needlessly to the path they tread, “is that for all his unfailing kindness, I would never have expected that. No one takes blows meant for me—everyone knows better. They might not like it, they might worry for me, but they know, and they understand. The reason I can face primals and Ascians and Garlean warlords and what have you is because I can survive what others cannot.”

 _But suppose you hadn’t survived that blow_ , something cold and desperate within G’raha wants to demand of her, for he has borne witness to a future without her in it, one wherein she must surely have thought that she could weather whatever felled her. He can clearly imagine how Lord Haurchefant must have felt in that moment, for he knows in his very bones he would have done the same without a second thought.

“And now he’s gone,” says Adrienne. All the fire has fled her voice. “And so I can’t ask him why he would do such a thing for me.”

A breathless, mirthless laugh escapes G’raha’s lungs. “Because he _loved_ you, of course,” he says, as gently as he can manage. “Because he believed in you. Because your life was worth so much more to him than his own that there wasn’t even a question—“

Adrienne stops walking. She turns on him sharply, looming over him in a way she never has, her height notwithstanding. He realizes suddenly that although her voice has remained steady, her eyes are shining and her lower lip trembles as she gazes down upon him, angry and hurting.

“Yes, that’s sort of what I imagined you’d say,” she says, low and somehow dangerous. “Shall I tell you another story?”

It is all G’raha can do not to cower under her steely gaze. “All right.”

“This one is about a young Elezen woman who always saw the best in everyone,” she begins, “even when it wasn’t there. She fell in love with a man who was fun, but flighty, not cruel, but certainly not possessed of a particularly noble heart. They had a baby together, and then he left her.”

He wonders, with a cold kind of shock, if she is talking about herself. A thousand possibilities course through him all at once, each more terrible than the last.

“Everyone else saw it coming,” Adrienne continues. “No one was surprised, or even sympathetic. And when she took her own life?” she leans in. “They were _angry_ with her.”

She seems to remember herself suddenly. She sighs heavily. “I suppose I would have been, too,” she amends, quietly, “if I’d been a bit older when it happened.”

The shock does not diminish. Only the shape changes. G’raha searches frantically for something to say, but Adrienne holds out a hand to stop him.

“Despite appearances, I don’t tell you this to be cruel, or to beg for sympathy,” she says, straightening her posture and drawing away from him in the process. “I think it says a great deal about my clan that they refused even to try to understand how my mother was suffering, that even in death they resented her for what she had left behind.”

She meets his eyes again, soft and vulnerable. “But it does worry me,” she tells him, “when I can see that someone I hold dear has little regard for his own life.”

She reaches for both of his hands this time. “I can’t even begin to imagine what it must have been like for you all these years,” she says softly. “There are a lot of things I could tell you, about the way the people of the Crystarium spoke of you in your absence, perhaps, or how terribly my Aunt Sophiane grieved for my mother even though she never stopped being angry, even though she never understood.”

Adrienne looks down and squeezes his hands. “Instead, I’d like to ask you for something.”

“Anything,” he breathes, and he scarcely realizes he has spoken aloud until her lips curl into a sad smile.

“If what you said is true, if you would give me anything, deny me nothing—“

She looks up into his eyes once more, sad and serious. “If you would _die_ for me,” she says, and her brow furrows subtly, “would you live for me, instead? I don’t know what the days ahead will hold, but will you promise me to take care of yourself? Not to throw your life away? Not to treat it as less important than the lives of others? Please, I—“

Her voice breaks. A tear slips down her cheek, sparkling like crystal in the strange glow of the Tower.

“I don’t know what I’d do if I had to lose you again,” she tells him. “I don’t know that I’d ever recover.”

Before G’raha can even think to respond, Adrienne’s expression brightens considerably. She lets go of one of his hands and reaches up to wipe the tears away from his own face. He hadn’t realized he was crying.

“Is that a yes?” She cradles his cheek in her hand. 

G’raha nods mutely.

Adrienne leans in and presses a kiss to his forehead, his nose, and finally, his lips. His body still trembles, overwrought with emotion, and he draws her flush against him, desperate to keep her close. For the first time in as long as he can remember, he feels not merely lucky to be alive, but _glad_.

Hardly thinking, he crowds her up against the wall of the large corridor in which they’ve stopped, running his hands along her sides, digging his fingers into the subtle swell of her hips as though he could draw her any nearer to him. His quarters are nothing special, he thinks, as he parts with her lips only to traverse the angle of her jaw. He’ll have her right here, if she’ll allow it, he thinks, as he draws the tender flesh of her neck between his teeth until she lets out a breathy whine and fists her hand in his hair.

Adrienne laughs suddenly, not cruelly, but the sound startles him back to himself. She is looking around at the curious crystalline walls, surely different in design from the parts of the Tower she has seen. “Sorry,” she grins down at him. “It’s not you, it’s just—where _are_ we?”

“Oh!’ G’raha stammers, grateful that none save himself had to hear his previous trail of thought. “Forgive me. Not much further.”

He makes to pull away, but she pulls him back against her and into another kiss. “No rush,” she assures him. “It just struck me how little of this tower I must have seen.”

G’raha feels himself returning her easy smile, dazed and dreamy. “I’d show you all of it, if you’d like.”

“Hm,” Adrienne kisses him again, slow and sweet, draping her arms over his shoulders. “While it is a tempting offer,” she says, “at the moment I think I’d prefer to see more of its keeper.”

It is a blessing to forget himself so completely, and one which will not last. “Well then,” he says richly, positively glowing under the warmth of her attention, “while there is certainly an appeal to having you right here—“ Adrienne raises her eyebrows, and her expression of surprised delight very nearly causes him to stumble over his words. “--I doubt it would prove very comfortable.”

“Lead the way,” she says, utterly failing to conceal her amusement, “my _lord Exarch_.”

He means to reproach her. Really, he does. He means to groan a century’s worth of displeasure, to push her away with weary words, kind but summarily discouraging, the way she used to do in another lifetime, before he’d been able to stop himself from clumsily flirting with her at every opportunity.

But somehow the “ _please_ ” he utters comes out all wrong. His voice breaks. His ears have perked up, and his face has flushed red, all entirely without his permission.

If he thinks his champion will politely pretend not to notice, will permit him to bear his shame in peace, he is sorely mistaken. As he turns away from her to lead the way, she leans in close behind him, her lips just barely brushing the sensitive tip of his ear. “I _knew_ it,” she whispers, victorious.

Whatever feeble vestige of control, of restraint to which he has been clinging dissolves in an instant. He practically drags her the rest of the way to his chambers, spurred onward by a quest for more of her whispered words in his ear, no matter what she might say.

He’s half-expecting her to stop him as the door yields to the wave of his free hand, perhaps out of a desire to investigate his highly uninteresting quarters, or merely to tease him for his sudden sense of urgency, but he is proven mercifully incorrect. She follows behind him matching every bit of his eagerness, pulling him down onto his own bed—which, it must be noted, has gone nigh-completely unused since her arrival here on the First—as soon as she has located it.

When at last they settle close together on the bed, the merciless march of time seems somehow to relent, ever so slightly, and G’raha lets out a sigh of contentment as an unaccountable warmth courses through him. Adrienne wraps him in a strong embrace as she kisses him, and there is something so grounding, so steadying about it that the realization that he is not dreaming, that this is really happening, fills him not with cold and creeping panic, but with joy.

At least—until Adrienne starts tugging at the fastenings on his robes.

Her hands are not hasty or insistent. She has somehow managed to tug his hair free of its braid without his notice, and she has taken her time combing her fingers through it. She has cradled his face in her hands and she has traced the path the crystal has carved from just below his eye down to the dip between his collarbones. It is only natural that she should test the strange fastenings of his robes. Only natural, only to be expected, and yet G’raha Tia comes crashing back into himself all at once. Every muscle in his body goes stiff, and he cannot quite seem to catch his breath. 

He will ruin this. If he does anything, if he so much as moves, so much as breathes, he will ruin everything.

Adrienne relinquishes her hold on him so suddenly that she leaves a rush of cool air in her wake. “You don’t have to,” she says hurriedly.

G’raha catches her hands in his before she can withdraw any further. He pulls them close against his chest, aware that he is clutching onto them with excessive force, but unable to stop, unable to do anything else, terrified that if he so much as loosens his grip upon her, she will slip through his fingers altogether.

Adrienne’s tongue darts across her lips. “I shouldn’t have asked you, before,” she lowers her gaze, frowning subtly. “I knew you wouldn’t say no, if I asked.”

It had been difficult enough to disrobe for her when she could not even see him. Adrienne was an eager lover even under such limitations. He can hardly imagine what she will be like now, especially since she was denied her curiosity before. He isn’t sure which would be harder to bear—the keen, sharp-eyed manner in which she usually examines her surroundings, or this strange new gentleness with which she has graced him this evening, which leaves him feeling a little like a wounded animal.

“If I may…” Adrienne continues, as though she has taken great pains in deciding to speak, “it seemed…more than mere nerves.”

A breathless huff of laughter escapes him. He swallows hard.

Many long years ago, when his best course of action became clear to him, G’raha Tia had not hesitated. To merge himself with the Crystal Tower, to partake of all that it could offer him, seemed only natural, only right.

The pain was excruciating, to be certain, and the result bizarre when he really looked at it, but he hardly concerned himself with the state of his right hand when first the deed was done. The reward—his strength, his stamina, and _oh_ , all of that magical prowess he had only ever dreamed of possessing, was more than worth the strangeness of it.

That the Tower had taken more of him when he brought it across the rift was to be expected. It claimed the whole of his right arm and spread across his shoulders in a strange and unnatural pattern, like the veins of some unknowable abomination, pulsing and alive, a parasite taking root in his flesh. It did not frighten him then. He’d had no time to feel fear in those early days.

He doesn’t remember the battle when he noticed it. There have been so many. He felt a pain, something sharp and prickling crawling up his arm and across his chest, and he ignored it until the battle was finished. He ignored it on the journey back to the Tower and all throughout the evening as he saw that all in the Crystarium was in working order.

He ignored it until it spread up into his neck and his jaw. He had never felt such a pain, and he could not begin to imagine what had caused it until he set eyes upon himself in a mirror. How long had it been, he remembers wondering, since he had gotten a proper look at himself? How much had the crystal spread before he even took notice of the missing fragments of himself? How long before the Tower took more than G’raha Tia had to give? What would become of it all, when there was nothing left of him for the Tower to feast upon?

But he would rather not tell Adrienne any of this. Not least because to say it aloud would solidify the terror that wells within him even now. For as there is still more of him to take, so the Tower continues to take. Just when he has decided he is glad to be alive, just when he has promised her he will gladly have a care for his life at her whim, he is not eager to acknowledge that there may soon come a day when the matter is rent from his hands.

G’raha releases his grip upon her and holds up his crystal hand for her to see. “It is strange to look at, is it not?” he asks her. He had hoped to feign some semblance of neutrality, but the tremor in his voice gives him away. “Stranger still to have it as a part of one’s own body, I assure you.”

Adrienne’s eyes widen, horrified. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t—“

“Please, there’s no need to apologize,” he assures her. “I— _hate_ to look upon it, and excepting some morbid curiosity, I assumed anyone else would, as well. That you should look upon me and find me repulsive would be both…” he turns his hand over “…intolerable and entirely expected.”

Adrienne takes his proffered hand with the utmost gentleness. He can almost feel the shape of the golden vein she traces with her fingertips. “I’ll concede to a fair amount of curiosity,” she says. “But repulsion?” She ducks her head so that he is forced to meet her eyes. She smiles. “Unlikely, to say the least.”

Can he safely return to his previous assumption, that this is a dream from which he is sure to wake at any moment? G’raha wraps his fingers around Adrienne’s hand and pulls it to his lips.

“May I ask you another question?”

G’raha looks up. “Of course.”

Adrienne averts her gaze almost shyly, lips curling into a wry smile. “Forgive me if I belabor a point,” she begins carefully, “but all that passed between us before feels quite strange to remember. As I recall, when I insisted upon accosting you then, you told me I was the first to do so.”

“To accost me?” G’raha teases without thinking. “No.”

Adrienne looks up, surprised, and shoves him lightly. “You know very well what I mean!”

Loath though he is to look away from her, radiant as she is in her amusement, his own bashfulness soon wins out. “I spoke true, before,” he confesses. “There have been…offers, from time to time, with…” he winces involuntarily at memories he has done his best to banish from his mind “…varying degrees of finesse, but none held very much appeal.”

G’raha hadn’t been well-liked in his formative years, and setting that aside, the way such matters were handled in his tribe had been unsavoury, to say the least. Amongst the Students of Baldesion he had thrown himself into his studies, desperate not only for knowledge but to prove himself, and he had been unwilling to set aside his single-minded pursuits for more than the occasional social gathering—even then only under threat of duress from those who had taken an inexplicable liking to him. And after that—

After that, there had been _her_. And by the time he had lived long enough in a world where she had died young, by the time he was old enough to tell himself that perhaps it was not helpful for him to continue to nurture such an impossible infatuation, his fate was already long sealed, and any feeble attempt to move on from her would have felt paltry, perhaps even downright disgusting.

“And…” he dares a glance upward. “And you, if I may be so bold?”

Adrienne lifts a shoulder amiably. “Here and there,” she replies. “Nothing serious, and, if I may say so, certainly nothing half as interesting.”

“So you don’t make a habit of asking near-strangers to blindfold you?” It’s something he would have said a hundred years ago, he cannot help but think, and it is in that spirit alone that he allows the words to pass his lips.

She shoves him again, poorly concealing her amusement. “I certainly do not! Though…” she hesitates a moment, glancing away, “I’ll concede it was fun.”

“Then…” G’raha dares shyly, “you’d try it again?”

Adrienne affords him a sidelong glance, all mischief. “Asking strangers to blindfold me?” she needles. “No, I think I’ve got my sights set on just the one, thanks.”

He laughs and ducks his head, not a little embarrassed even to have put voice to the thought, but he is not granted a long respite. Adrienne reaches out to touch just below his chin, willing him to meet her eyes once more, and he can do naught but obey.

“Forgive me my teasing,” she says. “Truthfully there are a great many things I would try, so long as you were involved.” She leans forward to capture his lips, and he follows her lead all too willingly, positively dizzy with the notion. “But for now,” she tells him between kisses, “I want to see you.” She pulls away suddenly. “If that’s all right with you,” she amends.

And what is he to do, when he is offered all he has never dared to want for himself? What was he ever to do? Turn away, because he fears—because he _knows_ he cannot give her even a fraction of what she deserves?

He nods his silent affirmation, too overcome even to begin to put voice to his thoughts, and he undoes the peculiar fastenings on his robes with trembling fingers.

Adrienne traces the divide between crystal and flesh with the tips of her fingers as G’raha shrugs the robes from his shoulders, starting at his jaw and working her way down to his collarbones. He used to be uncommonly sensitive there, he remembers suddenly, and he’d taken to wearing something to cover his neck to discourage wayward touching. He’d often wished the excess of sensation away in his youth, and has never found cause to miss it until now, when he can only just barely feel Adrienne’s hands over his heart.

He holds his own hand over hers and lets his eyes fall closed, trying to imagine what it would be like if his body were still whole, if he were not so petrified by the notion of allowing her to see him, if he could come before her as something even half her equal.

How long has it been since last he was forced to consider the path the crystal has taken? He banished the knowledge from his mind before, eyes half-closed, consumed with visions of her, safe in the darkness of her room and the knowledge that she could not see him, and so he needn’t see himself. The better half of his right side has been claimed by crystal, all the way down past his hip. Ordinarily, as he told her before, it feels like nothing, but oh, when he ventured too far from the Tower’s reach, he felt as though he truly were turning to stone.

The memory sends a shudder coursing through him, and he pushes it away, opening his eyes to see Adrienne still mapping the crystal upon his torso with her free hand, eyes alight with interest. She looks up into his eyes with a questioning smile. His lips part, but no words come. He reaches for her, threading his fingers through her hair to pull her into a kiss, and then promptly relinquishes his hold upon her hand so that he can feel the softness of her hair against his fingers.

The crystal hasn’t spread quite as far across his back, he realizes as she runs her hands over his bared shoulders. When she drags her fingers along his spine, he shivers involuntarily, and a highly undignified noise escapes his lips. Perhaps mercifully, his unfortunate reaction only encourages her to retrace her steps again and again, until he is positively melting into her touch.

To his surprise, it is Adrienne who breaks the silence between them, and her voice is heavy with emotion. “I’ve missed you so much,” she tells him, pressing another lingering kiss to his lips before she pulls him into a strong embrace. “Gods, how I’ve missed you,” she breathes into his hair, with such tenderness, with such _truth_ that he can do nothing but believe her.

“I thought—“ he begins without thinking, words spilling forth in a rush of emotion. “I never expected you to remember me so fondly,” he confesses into the fabric of her robes. “You meet so many, inspire so many, I thought—“

Adrienne pulls away, taking his face in her hands. “None like you,” she tells him seriously.

G’raha is left breathless, lips still half-parted, gazing up at her with purest wonder. There is more he would say, far too much, and he is just barely holding it at bay. If he begins, if he tells her even a fraction of what he feels for her in this moment, he will never stop. 

Instead he pulls her close and captures her lips once more, and he finds rather quickly that there is far too much clothing still between them. His insecurities half-forgotten, he shrugs his robes away and sets about finding the fastenings of Adrienne’s. He pushes up her tunic, desperate for the feel of her skin under his hands, and she relinquishes her hold upon him long enough to pull it over her head.

G’raha eagerly descends upon the newly-bared skin of her neck, chasing that particular sound she makes when he draws the sensitive skin gently between his teeth, and he is rewarded this time with both of her hands grasping tightly at his hair. He, for his part, runs his hands over her shoulders and down her sides, before deciding he’ll see whether tracing the length of her spine with his fingertips will elicit the same response from her as it did from him.

There is something nigh-intoxicating about the notion, Adrienne melting into his arms under his touch, and suddenly he can think of nothing else. He presses his fingers gently into her skin, delighting in the way she gasps and holds him tighter, and he adjusts slightly so that he can explore more of her with his lips. He ducks his head down to the subtle swell of her breasts and takes her nipple into his mouth. She arches into him with a low, rich sound that shoots through him like a physical blow.

Aroused though he was already, there is an urgency to his movements now, a need to see her undone beneath his touch in a rather different fashion. His hands find her hips, steadying her as he continues sucking at her nipple, drawing it gently between his teeth and eliciting a truly wonderful cry from her lips, and he brings his crystal hand up to give proper attention to the other, relenting only when she is panting and grasping at him.

He moves again, pulling her away from the wall and adjusting his pillow so that she can lie down comfortably before he sets about divesting her of her trousers. “It occurs to me,” he says, distracted enough by his task to speak freely, “that taking you in the hallway might have been even less practical than I thought.”

Adrienne laughs breathlessly. “You’ll forgive me if I dress for efficient casting of magic and not for trysts in mysterious hallways.”

“Even still,” G’raha teases lightly, “tonight was meant to be a celebration of your victory. Were you expecting a battle?”

“Suppose I were accosted in a mysterious hallway.”

He looks up to find her grinning wickedly back at him, and he is very nearly robbed of his powers of speech by the sight of her, naked but for her smallclothes, one arm draped lazily over her stomach, the other splayed out upon the sheets. “Yes,” he breathes, “whatever would you do?”

She reaches out for him, and he can do nothing but acquiesce. “But since this matter has been brought to my attention,” she continues, “I might someday feel inspired to dress with a different goal in mind.”

There is nothing to be done for his sharp intake of breath at the mere notion, and though he is certain colour promptly floods his cheeks, her answering laughter is almost worth his embarrassment.

“Would you like that?” she wonders, her voice soft and warm as she draws her fingertips over his bare torso, hooking them into the band of his smallclothes. “Knowing I dressed just for you? Thinking of how much I wanted you to—“

“Gods,” G’raha hisses, surprising her into silence by divesting her of her smallclothes and burying his face between her thighs. She cries out, a sound like music to his ears, and he takes both of her hands, threading their fingers together as he works. How surpassingly foolish, he cannot help but think in this moment, to fear her eyes upon him. What could compare with glancing upward to see her flushed cheeks, her parted, panting lips, and her bright, shining eyes gazing down at him with purest desire?

He cannot look away from her. Her grip tightens on his hands and she arches into him as he draws her clit between his lips, flicking his tongue the way she’d seemed to like best before, but oh, nothing could have prepared him for the bliss of seeing her eyes fall closed at long last, her head thrown back, the truth of his name upon her lips.

He continues for as long as she will allow, delighting in the way she trembles and squirms beneath him, rolling her hips against him until she can bear no more. She pulls away with a sigh, eyes still closed and body gone momentarily limp.

“You’re sure you’ve never done that before?” she wonders breathlessly.

He surprises into laughter, pressing a lingering kiss to her thigh that elicits another gasp from her. “Only the once.”

Adrienne hums, reclaiming her hands to push herself up. “Well, I must say, while the blindfold was exciting, I much preferred seeing you.” She cups his face in her hand before returning her attention to the matter of his smallclothes.

G’raha ducks his head bashfully, overcome by a juvenile urge to rub the back of his neck. “Well,” he manages, grinning like a fool in the general direction of the far wall, “the feeling was mutual.”

“Then,” Adrienne’s fingers find the band of his smallclothes once more, sending a shiver through him unlike anything he has ever felt before, “I hope you’ll allow me to return the favour?”

“Oh,” G’raha stammers, looking up at her with wide eyes, “please, you needn’t—“

Adrienne’s soft chuckle silences him. She leans in, brushing her lips over his. “I know I _needn’t_ ,” she teases him gently. “I would _like_ to. Would you like me to?”

“I—“ His lips form empty syllables, but no sound comes out. His throat has gone dry, and that voice in the back of his head returns to the forefront with a vengeance, the one that screams, that tells him he’d be better off dead, she’d be better off without him, that whatever he does, it is never, ever enough, not for anyone, and certainly not for her.

He is stunned to feel Adrienne’s hands on his shoulders, heavy and grounding. “I’m sorry, Raha,” she says, somehow gentle enough to soothe but not so gentle that he feels even half as pathetic as he rightly ought to. He looks up into her eyes and she smiles reassuringly. “It’s not a timed question,” she tells him, tilting her head playfully. “The offer doesn’t expire.”

Awestruck and reeling, G’raha takes one of her hands between both of his, closes his eyes, and presses kiss after kiss to her knuckles. “Never,” he swears, “on any star, in any lifetime, could I deserve you.”

A small huff of laughter escapes Adrienne’s lips. “Are you quite sure?” she wonders breathlessly. “And what would render you worthy, do you suppose? Because I think I’ve made my stance on giving your life for me quite clear.”

 _What will happen,_ he wants to demand of her, _when you are called to your next adventure?_ What will happen when she is too busy for trips across time and space just for a friendly visit? What will happen when the passage of time shifts between their two worlds again, and she returns to find that another hundred years have passed in her absence?

What will happen if she finds one day that she cannot return, and he is left here, forever waiting, forever wondering whether something has befallen her, some fresh danger he could not foresee, from which he cannot save her—or whether she has merely grown tired of him, as he always knew she would?

But he is reminded of something she said to him only a few nights prior, in a rush that feels almost like relief. “Forgive me,” he says, smiling up at her. “Pray,” he kisses her hand again, again, “forgive me my foolishness.”

 _Just be here with me, just for tonight_ , she had entreated him. _We’ll worry about tomorrow when it comes._

He had very nearly wept against her lips when she had spoken those words. What he would have given then, knowing as he did that his end drew ever nearer, for just one more night spent in her company. To worry for the future now is to spit upon the glory of the gift he has been granted.

Adrienne returns his smile with a subtle quirk of her brow, clearly taken aback by his sudden change in demeanour, but she does not press him. Indeed, it is passing strange, the way she looks upon him now, starry-eyed and almost—awestruck, very much the way he imagines he must always look at her.

“So?” she asks him, after a moment.

“I—“ he utters, faltering, still smiling in pure disbelief. “Would you…? I would…”

For a mercy, Adrienne needs no further encouragement. She drags her fingers down his torso once more and he shifts to aid her in removing his smallclothes at long last. He watches her with unmitigated fascination as she pushes him back onto the bed, threading her fingers with his and pinning his hands down as she kisses him soundly, as though he could possibly gather the wherewithal in this moment to do anything of consequence with his hands.

She litters haphazard kisses all across his shoulders and torso as she moves down his body, glancing upward to meet his searching gaze as she settles herself between his legs. If he saw any reluctance, any shred of hesitation hanging about her, he would stop her at once, and a thousand apologies are never far from his tongue. But he sees naught in her eyes but anticipation, even excitement, and her restraint, he realizes in a distant sort of way, is only for his benefit.

How to tell her, he wonders vaguely as she presses a kiss to the tip of him, eyes never leaving his, and he takes in a gasp as though he has been drowning? How to tell her that if the mere thought of ever having her was a particularly distant and fantastical sort of daydream, then this is somehow a step beyond that, so absurd as to be unthinkable, unimaginable—and even if, and he will never confess that it did, but even if the thought had ever crossed his mind, then it was to be banished as quickly as it had come.

Because in these distant and fantastical daydreams, the desire, the impossible wish, is that she wants him, even a fraction as much as he has always wanted her. And even a hundred years ago, when he was young and whole, and a bright future full of possibilities stretched out before him, he could never find it in himself to imagine her wanting to give him something so precious as this, something purely for his own pleasure, with no conceivable benefit to her.

And yet, inconceivably, she takes him into her mouth with enthusiasm, humming her satisfaction when a guttural moan escapes him and he grasps blindly for her, still half-clutching her hands. It is all he can do to keep still. His eyes water and his vision blurs, but he cannot bear to look away from her.

Her eyes fall closed as she takes him deeper, and he cannot rightly say what it is about this that brings about his undoing, but “Can’t believe you would—do this for me—” he breathes, utterly beside himself. “I’d never dared—not even in my darkest daydreams did I— _gods!_ “

It is too much—he has to close his eyes against it, has to call upon every fibre of self-control he has ever possessed, and he only just barely manages to pull away from her. He is alight with energy, his whole body humming, pulsing like a live wire as he draws her into a frenzied kiss, murmuring pleas and promises both against her lips.

“Please,” he begs, “please, let me take you, like this,” he switches their positions, pressing her down into the sheets, laying her head carefully upon his pillow, basking in the warmth of her gaze. “Let me see your eyes, look at me while I—”

“Yes,” she breathes, pulling him ever nearer, “yes, _please_.”

He drags his hand—the left one, the one that can feel properly—over her stomach and down between her legs, and the wetness he finds there sends a shiver through him just as it had once before. Will he ever tire of such a wonder? The physical evidence of her desire, and for _him_ , of all people?

He slides into her, captivated by the way her lovely features contort in unmistakable ecstasy, once again calling upon the vast reserves of his self-control to wait, to measure her reaction with care. “Is it all right?” he asks her, reaching up to trace the angle of her jaw with his fingertips, to brush his thumb over the softness of her parted lips.

Adrienne smiles up at him, her pale eyes, ordinarily so sharp and discerning, gone heavy-lidded and hazy. She reaches up and runs a hand through his hair, pushing it away from his face. “It’s perfect,” she assures him. “You’re perfect.”

A sound escapes his lips, something that’s meant to be a chuckle but is dangerously close to a sob. He leans down to capture her lips as he buries himself fully in her, intending to ask her again if she is all right as soon as he can bear to pull away, but by the _gods_ , he cannot keep his hips completely still.

“Raha,” she murmurs against his lips, instead, and he pulls away immediately, perhaps a bit startled by the invocation of his name, but far more afraid that he has erred already. But Adrienne is still smiling. “I was just going to tell you it’s all right,” she says. “I feel like you’re going to ask me again.”

His lips part, but words fail him. “I—you’re sure?” he asks her, anyway.

Adrienne gazes up at him a moment, something different about her expression that he cannot quite place. There is no sadness in the set of her eyes or the curl of her lips, and yet he gets the sense that she is on the verge of tears.

“What are you thinking?” he asks her.

Adrienne shakes her head. “Just wondering what I ever did to deserve you. And—”

Before G’raha has the time even to begin processing the words she has spoken, she continues, her eyes sparkling not with unshed tears, but with mischief. Her grip on his shoulder turns hard, and he can feel her nails digging into his skin as she arches up to continue, her words barely more than a whisper.

“—what it’s going to take to convince you to fuck me.”

Evidently, this is more than enough to achieve her ends. G’raha’s hips stutter against her like a kneejerk reaction, and his mind goes blissfully silent. “You know full well,” he says, breathless, kissing her lips, her nose, her forehead with the utmost tenderness, “that there is nothing I would deny you. You need only ask.”

“Then please,” she entreats him, and the word, _please_ , upon her lips, and meant only for him, sends a fresh wave of desire coursing through him. “ _Please_ , fuck me.”

It is enough to unravel him. For a moment he is sure he sees stars. He is distantly aware of taking her hands, pressing them into the sheets as he thrusts into her. True to her word, she does not look away from him, watching him raptly as he loses himself in her.

Principles be damned, his own tenuous sanity be damned thrice over—he will take whatever she will give him, greedily, selfishly, and with aplomb. He will delight when she returns to him and despair when she leaves him, over and over again, no matter how long it lasts. If the Tower means to eat him alive, then let her do it first.

His hands fall to her hips, desperate for more of her, driven by that need to see her undone beneath him. Reading her before had been difficult. Enticing though it was to draw her flush against him, to bury his face in the crook of her neck, and to hear her sweet cries just shy of his ear, seeing her is infinitely better. Everything, from the curl of her fingers at his sides to the set of her brow to the way she clenches around him, tells him that she is close, that she wants this, that she wants _him_.

Her release is a beauty all its own. Her eyes fall closed at last, her lips just barely forming the syllables of his name. His own movements grow frenzied and erratic, his eyes watering with the effort of watching her, reluctant to miss even an instant of the sight even as his vision goes dark around the edges and purest bliss overtakes him.

He falls into her waiting arms as glorious aftershocks course through him, followed by the delicious warmth of Adrienne’s hum of satisfaction, her arms folding lazily around him.

A heady declaration of his love for her dies on his lips, and he presses them instead to the angle of her collarbone in silence. It is the wrong moment, and if she doesn’t know, if it isn’t as obvious to her as anything, then he will not squander his chance to tell her properly.

Before doubt can creep back in, remind him that this perfect moment cannot last, that although he may have privately declared that he cares not how many times she leaves and returns, it is still the truth of the matter, and will come to pass, whatever either one of them might prefer, Adrienne’s fingers find the tips of his ears, and G’raha’s first word to her in the wake of what has just transpired between them is a terribly undignified non-syllable.

“Is that all right?” she asks him, her voice sweet and hazy.

“Mhm,” is all he can manage.

He feels rather than hears her soft laughter. Her gentle touch is very nearly too much, and yet he cannot bear to part from her. At last he gathers the wherewithal to pull out of her, at the very least, and to move to lay at her side rather than resting the full weight of his body upon her.

Not that she seems to mind. She parts from him with a sigh and turns to face him where he settles himself, one hand curling in front of her while the other reaches out to push the hair from his face.

She awards him a smile so tender that words of love bubble up within him afresh. He is stunned into silence only when she moves to press a kiss to his nose, and then brushes her lips lightly over his, languid and unhurried.

“Let me do something for you,” he implores instead, returning her kisses with intent.

Adrienne surprises into laughter. “What?”

“Anything,” he insists. “Please, you’ve—done so much for me.”

Adrienne still looks very much like she is on the verge of laughter. “I think I need to tell your countless admirers to be nicer to you, after all,” she teases. “But there is one more curiosity you could answer for me, since you asked.”

“Of course.” He kisses her again, gravely, sincerely.

‘Before, when you sat with me for awhile,” says Adrienne, “I could have sworn I heard you singing.”

It is G’raha’s turn to be surprised into a soft chuckle. There is still pain in the recollection, clutching onto her hand and committing every line of it to memory, lingering there until night had very nearly given way to morning. “I was,” he concedes. He moves so that he can thread the fingers of his left hand with hers, without putting undue distance between them. With his right hand, he tucks a stray strand of hair behind her ear and cups her cheek, cursing the crystal that numbs him to the precise feeling of her skin.

“What were you singing?” she breathes, leaning into his touch.

A terrible flicker of pain shoots through his arm quite suddenly, too fast to anticipate. His wince is obvious, and it startles Adrienne into alertness.

“Are you all right?”

It is all G’raha can do not to glare openly at his offending hand. He shifts onto his back, instead, as though to put as much distance between her and his crystal hand as possible. “It was nothing,” he tells her, in a tone he hopes is reassuring.

Adrienne watches him carefully as she settles herself against him, but she is clearly tired. He doubts very much that she got any rest this afternoon, and her soft sigh as he wraps his unmarred arm about her tells him that she will not press the issue tonight, at least.

When her breathing turns slow and heavy, G’raha lifts up his crystal hand, turning it over as though it could give him the answer he seeks. Where did it end before, he wonders, daring a glance down at his own body. How long has it gone that far down? He remembers, vaguely, the way his joints stiffened when he wandered too far from the Tower’s reach to follow the Scions to Kholusia, but his mind was understandably preoccupied then, and so he hadn’t paid much mind to—

“Raha?”

The sound of his name on her lips startles him, perhaps mercifully, from his reverie. “Hm?” More to give himself something to do than for any other reason, he pulls away from her and sets about gently encouraging her to move beneath the covers.

“You never answered me,” she reminds him sleepily. She acquiesces easily enough to being moved, but seems unwilling to let go of him entirely for too long. As soon as she is settled underneath the covers, she tugs at his arm, willing him to rejoin her, and he is only too happy to comply.

“Ah, forgive me, so I didn’t,” he says as he returns to her. “It was an old song, something I half-remembered from my youth, I think. Let me see if I remember the words…”

He takes her into his arms, settling himself with care so that he shouldn’t need to move in the night, and he banishes thoughts of creeping crystal to the very far corners of his mind. He’d heard the song from a traveler, he thinks, who carried a lute on his back. G’raha presses a kiss to Adrienne’s forehead, and the sweetness of her answering sigh emboldens him to grant her simple request.

_“Tell me, where is the road I can call my own,  
That I left, that I lost so long ago?  
All these years I have wandered, oh when will I know  
There's a way, there's a road that will lead me home?”_

Adrienne nuzzles into his neck, and her fingers curl against the small of his back, sending a wave of pleasant tingles coursing through him, quite unlike anything he has ever felt before. Perhaps it is foolish, a thought borne of bliss beyond his wildest imaginings, of a night that has felt like something well past the scope of a dream, but G’raha Tia swears privately in that moment that he will find a way to pursue a proper future with Adrienne, one where he possesses something, _anything_ that is worthy of her time, even if this broken body should seem determined to fail him just when the prospect of living has become tolerable.

G’raha has never been a man afraid of incredible risk, especially not when the reward is—everything. Everything he has never dared to want for himself.

_“After wind, after rain, when the dark is done,  
As I wake from a dream in the gold of day,  
Through the air there's a calling from far away,  
There's a voice I can hear that will lead me home._

_Rise up, follow me, come away, is the call,  
With the love in your heart as the only song;  
There is no such beauty as where you belong;  
Rise up, follow me, I will lead you home.”_

The room darkens around them at his whim, though the strange glow of the crystal never goes out completely. At times it bothers him, reminds him of the unnatural length of his life and the tether he can never break, but tonight he thinks only of the chilly night air in Mor Dhona, and the way the light from the distant Tower shone in Adrienne’s pale eyes as she smiled down upon him. When he thinks of it like that, he decides, unaware that he, himself, is halfway to slumber for what must be the first time in weeks, the Tower’s light is quite beautiful.


End file.
